UBS Just Called Vancouver One of the World’s Weakest Housing Markets. Here Is What That Actually Means for Buyers

“World’s weakest housing market” is a headline designed to scare people. If you own a Vancouver condo, it probably did. If you are trying to buy one, I would read it very differently.

Last week, Swiss bank UBS released its 2026 Global Real Estate Bubble Index, which tracks home prices in 23 major cities. Vancouver and Toronto came in at the bottom for price growth. Both recorded inflation-adjusted price declines of roughly 10 percent over the past year, while prices across the other cities were broadly flat. At the top, Seoul, Lisbon, Madrid and Hong Kong each rose around 10 percent.

Here is what the report actually says, what it does not say, and why I think it is more useful to buyers than to anyone else.

What UBS actually found

The headline number is the one-year drop. According to UBS’s own release, real house prices in Vancouver and Toronto fell by roughly 10 percent, the steepest declines of any city in the study. Frankfurt and Munich also fell, but more moderately.

The longer view is just as striking. As reported by the Financial Post and CTV News, Vancouver prices are down about 20 percent from their 2022 peak, and Toronto’s are down about 30 percent. Toronto was UBS’s strongest market for eight straight years between 2014 and 2022. Four years later it sits at the bottom.

UBS’s summary of Vancouver, quoted by BNN Bloomberg, points to elevated inventory, slower economic growth, inflation concerns and the risk of further rate hikes as the weights on near-term prices. It also notes home sales are sitting at a 25-year low.

“Weakest” does not mean “about to crash”

This is the part the headlines skip. The index is a bubble risk index, and UBS actually lowered its risk rating for both Canadian cities. Vancouver and Toronto are now rated “moderate” risk, down from “elevated” in 2024. The only two cities rated high risk this year are Zurich and Tokyo.

Put simply, “weakest” describes price momentum over the past year. It is not a prediction. A market that has already corrected 20 percent has less air left in it than a market that has not. UBS’s view is that Vancouver’s froth has been working its way out, not building up.

One more detail worth knowing: UBS measures prices in real terms, meaning after inflation. The drop you would see on an actual price tag is smaller than the headline 10 percent. For context, the Financial Post reports Metro Vancouver’s benchmark home price was about $1.08 million in August, per Greater Vancouver Realtors.

Vancouver is still expensive. Just less so.

Nobody should read this report and conclude Vancouver is cheap. CMHC deputy chief economist Aled ab Iorwerth told the Financial Post that prices here remain expensive by international standards, even after the drop.

The UBS numbers bear that out in a specific way. According to BNN Bloomberg’s summary of the report, a Vancouver renter would need to pay rent for about 23 years to equal the price of a comparable 650-square-foot apartment. That is far below Zurich (46 years) or Geneva (40), but it still means owning costs meaningfully more than renting month to month. On the income side, the Financial Post reports Vancouver sits toward the more affordable end of UBS’s price-to-income measure, at roughly five years of average skilled-worker income for that same 650-square-foot home.

So the fair summary is this: Vancouver has gone from extremely overvalued to merely expensive. For a buyer, that is a real improvement, not a bargain.

Why this matters more for presale buyers than resale buyers

The UBS index measures the whole housing market, but the weakness has been sharpest in new condos. As I covered in Metro Vancouver’s $4.4 Billion Unsold Condo Problem, thousands of finished units are sitting unsold across the region, mostly larger and pricier homes. CMHC reports condo starts in Vancouver just had their weakest first half since 2011.

That creates two very different situations depending on where you stand.

If you are buying now, a weak market is leverage. Developers carrying standing inventory are negotiating on price, deposits and incentives in ways they would not have considered in 2021 or 2022. Sales at a 25-year low mean you are competing with far fewer buyers.

If you bought a presale near the peak and are closing soon, the same weakness is a risk. A 20 percent decline from peak can mean an appraisal at completion that comes in below your contract price, which leaves a gap you have to cover in cash. If that is you, talk to your mortgage broker now, not the month before closing.

The warning inside the report

There is one line of caution buyers should take seriously. The Financial Post quotes CMHC’s ab Iorwerth saying that if the economy recovers strongly over the next three years, he worries housing supply will not be there, and the market “could go into a bubble condition in a few years” if building does not continue.

That lines up with what I see in the presale pipeline. Weak prices today are discouraging the construction of the homes we will need in 2029 and 2030. When demand comes back, it will return to a market with fewer new condos than the last cycle. Weakness now and tightness later are two sides of the same coin.

What buyers should do with this

Do not treat “weakest in the world” as a reason to panic or a reason to rush. Treat it as a reason to negotiate.

If you are an end user planning to live in the home for years, this is one of the better entry points Metro Vancouver has offered in a long time. You have inventory to choose from, sellers who need to move units, and a market that UBS now rates as less risky than it was two years ago.

If you are investing, be more careful. UBS notes that in most cities it studied, the annual cost of owning a newly bought 650-square-foot home now exceeds 40 percent of a skilled worker’s gross income, and that higher-for-longer rates are likely to cap price gains in the near term. The easy appreciation years are not coming back on a short timeline.

Either way, the questions to ask are specific: how long has this unit been on the market, what has the price history been, what is the developer’s standing inventory, and what does the lender require at completion.

The bottom line

UBS did not say Vancouver’s housing market is broken. It said prices have fallen faster here than almost anywhere else, and that the bubble risk has eased as a result. For people who own, that stings. For people who have been priced out for a decade, it may be the opening they have been waiting for, as long as they buy for the long term and negotiate hard.

If you want help finding the projects where that negotiating room is real, register for VIP presale access at vancouverdwelling.ca. I track standing inventory, incentives and price history across Metro Vancouver so you can make an offer with the full picture.

Opinion: Eby’s Unsold Condo Tax Punishes the Last People Still Willing to Build Homes You Can Own

This is an opinion piece. It reflects my views as a presale specialist who has worked with Metro Vancouver buyers and developers since 2014.

Three months ago, David Eby stood beside Prime Minister Mark Carney and announced a plan to help finance the purchase of more than 2,200 empty condos across BC. Critics on all sides called it a bailout for developers. Eby said it was not, and that developers would be taking losses.

On September 22, he called a snap election for October 24. Three days later, standing in Burnaby with a condo tower under construction behind him, he announced the opposite approach: a new tax on those same developers.

I understand the politics. I do not understand the policy. And I think the people who will pay for it are not the developers he is aiming at. It is the buyers who come next.

What Eby is actually proposing

Here are the facts before the opinions. According to Daily Hive and The Canadian Press, the BC NDP’s “Unsold Condo Tax” would apply to newly completed strata condos left empty and unsold for more than a year. It would start at 2 percent and rise by 1 percentage point for every additional year a unit stays unsold. The party says it could bring about 5,000 condos into use, citing a September Real Property Data report that values Metro Vancouver’s unsold inventory at roughly $4.4 billion.

He also promised to double the Speculation and Vacancy Tax for domestic owners from 1 to 2 percent, and to raise it to 5 percent for foreign owners.

What the announcement did not include, per Daily Hive: an implementation date, how a unit’s taxable value would be set, any exemptions, or a maximum rate. That is a lot of blanks for a tax that could decide whether a tower gets built.

The premise is wrong

Eby’s pitch is that developers are sitting on finished condos “waiting for prices to go up.” I have been in this market a long time, and that is not what I see.

Nobody holding 300 empty units in Burnaby is waiting for a price spike. They are paying interest on construction loans that were supposed to be paid off at completion. They are paying strata fees, property tax, and insurance on every empty suite. Holding inventory is already the most expensive thing a developer can do. That is exactly why we have seen flash sales, quiet price cuts, and incentives piling up all year. The market is already doing what Eby says he wants. It is just slower than an election calendar.

The units that are stuck are mostly the large, expensive ones. As I wrote in Metro Vancouver’s $4.4 Billion Unsold Condo Problem, three-bedroom condos have the highest unsold rate of any common unit type, and more than 80 percent of unsold units are priced above $1 million. Those units were priced off 2022 land and construction costs. A tax does not change what they cost to build. It only changes who absorbs the loss, and how quickly.

Who would want to build now?

This is the question that matters most, and I cannot find a good answer.

Think about it from a lender’s side. To finance a condo tower in this region, a developer typically needs to presell a large share of the units before the bank releases construction money. The bank then carries risk for three to five years until completion. Eby is now telling every lender in BC that if the market softens at the end of that cycle, the province will add a new and growing annual tax on whatever is left.

A rational lender prices that in. That means tighter presale thresholds, higher rates, or simply saying no. And the projects that were marginal already, which in 2026 is most of them, stop being projects at all.

We are not starting from a healthy place. CMHC’s Fall 2026 Housing Supply Report, as summarized by STOREYS, found that condo apartment starts in Vancouver fell another 40 percent in the first half of this year, the weakest first half since 2011. Rental now makes up about 60 percent of starts. The ownership pipeline is already shrinking. This tax gives the people still willing to build for owners one more reason to stop.

The consequences nobody is talking about

It could hurt the presale buyers who are closing right now. If developers are pushed into fire sales, the first people hurt are buyers in the same building who signed at earlier prices. When comparable units sell at a discount, appraisals at completion can come in low. A low appraisal means the buyer has to bring more cash to close. I expect some of the families this tax is meant to help would feel that squeeze first.

It could push inventory to funds, not first-time buyers. When a developer needs to clear 200 units fast to avoid a tax bill, the quickest buyer is not a young couple waiting on mortgage approval. It is an institutional investor buying in bulk at a discount. The homes get “used,” which checks Eby’s box, but they become rentals owned by funds instead of starter homes owned by families.

It will be priced into every future launch. Developers do not absorb new risks forever. They build them into pro formas. The cost of a possible tax on unsold units shows up as higher prices per square foot at the next launch, or as a project that pivots to purpose-built rental, where this tax does not apply. Either way, the buyer pays.

It adds policy risk to a market that runs on certainty. Presales work because a buyer, a lender, and a developer all agree today on something that will exist in four years. Every surprise tax announced in the middle of that cycle makes the next agreement harder to reach.

What this means for the next generation

For most of my career, a presale condo was how a young person in this region got onto the property ladder. A 10 to 20 percent deposit spread over time, a few years to save, and a home at the end of it. That path is already narrowing. When 60 percent of what gets built is rental, the default future for someone graduating today is renting for life, with a landlord that is increasingly a pension fund or REIT.

I do not think that is the future Eby wants. But I think it is the future this kind of policy produces. You cannot tax the ownership pipeline and expect it to grow.

The case for the tax, in fairness

To be fair, the other side has an argument. Supporters would say 5,000 brand-new homes sitting empty during a housing crisis is indefensible, and that a clear penalty speeds up price discovery that would otherwise drag on for years. Lower prices on existing units do help buyers who can close today. And if the revenue really goes to affordable housing, some people will be better off. I do not dismiss that. I just think it trades a short-term price cut on 5,000 units for fewer units built across the next decade, and that is a bad trade for the people who have not bought yet.

What buyers should do now

Do not panic, and do not assume this becomes law. It is a campaign promise, the election is October 24, and there are no details yet. If you are shopping standing inventory, you already have leverage, and uncertainty may give you a little more. If you are closing on a presale in the next year, talk to your mortgage broker now about what happens if your appraisal comes in below your purchase price. And if you are thinking about a new launch, ask the developer and the lender directly how they are planning for policy risk.

The bottom line

In June, the answer was to help buy developers’ unsold condos. In September, with an election called, the answer is to tax them. Housing policy that changes direction with the campaign calendar is exactly the kind of uncertainty that stops homes from getting built. The buyers who pay for that are the ones who have not entered the market yet.

If you want straight answers on how this and other policy changes affect a specific project you are considering, register for VIP presale access at vancouverdwelling.ca. I will keep tracking what is promised, what gets passed, and what it means for your purchase.

BC Pauses Its Most Unpopular New Tax, and What It Means for Metro Vancouver Presale and Condo Buyers

On September 18, BC Premier David Eby announced the province is pausing a tax change that had drawn more public pushback than almost anything else in this year’s provincial budget. The planned expansion of the Provincial Sales Tax to a range of professional services, set to take effect October 1, is now on hold. For most British Columbians this reads as budget-page news. For anyone who owns or is about to own a condo in Metro Vancouver, it is more personal than that, because one of the services on the list was strata management, the fee every condo owner already pays every month.

What was actually about to happen on October 1

BC’s 2026 budget proposed extending the 7% PST to several professional services that had never carried it before: accounting and bookkeeping, security and private investigation, and architectural, engineering and geoscience services, the last group taxed on 30 percent of the price rather than the full amount. It also captured what the government called non-residential real estate services, a category that includes commissions on buying and selling non-residential property, rental property management, and strata management services.

That last item is the one worth pausing on. Strata management fees are built into the monthly strata fee on effectively every condo and townhome in the province, presale completions included. Adding 7% PST on top of what strata corporations already pay their management companies would have flowed straight into higher monthly fees for owners, with no input tax credit available to soften it, since BC’s PST does not work the way GST does for most businesses paying it.

Why this became BC’s most unpopular tax proposal in years

The province’s own legislative process ended up documenting just how unpopular this was. The Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services, in its report on 2027 budget consultations, noted it had received nearly 400 presentations and more than 1,100 written submissions from across BC. Among its 81 recommendations, the committee explicitly told the government to repeal the planned PST expansion to professional services.

The Canadian Federation of Independent Business told the committee that 80 percent of the businesses it surveyed opposed the expansion, and 72 percent said they intended to pass the added cost straight on to customers. The Greater Vancouver Board of Trade called it a new tax on tax on the services businesses rely on every day. The core objection from most of these groups was structural: BC’s PST has no broad system of input tax credits, so it tends to stack at every stage a service touches a project, an effect critics call tax cascading. The BC Conservatives seized on the committee’s finding and kept pressing the government publicly to scrap the change.

The line that mattered most for real estate

Buried in that same debate was a warning specific to housing. The BC Real Estate Association told the committee that applying PST to commercial and non-residential real estate services could raise costs throughout the development process and make some housing projects harder to finance. Architects, engineers, and geoscientists are exactly the professionals developers pay through a project’s design and permitting phase, well before a single unit sells. A new tax layered onto those fees does not stay with the developer. It works its way into land economics and, eventually, into what a project needs to charge per square foot to pencil out.

What actually changed on September 18

The government is not repealing the expansion outright. It is pausing it through a temporary regulation, and the framing matters. “There’s a time to stay the course and there’s a time to adjust. This is a time to adjust,” said Premier Eby, tying the delay explicitly to the ongoing Canada-US trade dispute rather than to the domestic backlash. Finance Minister Josie Osborne said the pause would help businesses and local governments manage costs during a period of economic uncertainty. The province estimates the pause saves people, local governments, and businesses roughly $260 million in the 2026-27 fiscal year, against original budget projections that had this tax bringing in $261 million in year one, rising to $534 million and then $563 million in the two years after.

The distinction between paused and repealed is not a technicality. A temporary regulation can be lifted once the trade war Eby referenced eases, which means this tax has not disappeared so much as been shelved pending conditions outside the government’s control.

What this means for presale and condo buyers

If you already own or are completing on a condo, your strata fees just avoided an increase that had nothing to do with your building’s actual operating costs. That is real, immediate relief, and it is worth knowing why your strata council was watching this file closely this fall.

If you are shopping a presale right now, this removes one input-cost pressure that was sitting on developers’ pro formas heading into Q4, at a time when many projects are already struggling to pencil out under high construction costs and soft absorption. It is a small tailwind, not a reason on its own to expect lower prices, but it is one less thing pushing costs up.

The longer-term lesson is the one to actually act on. This is a pause tied to trade conditions, not a permanent change in BC’s tax direction, and the government has been explicit that revenue pressure has not gone away. If you are budgeting a very long hold, factor in the possibility that professional-services PST, or something like it, resurfaces once the current trade dispute resolves. Policy uncertainty is itself a cost, and the buyers who do well over a five or ten year hold are the ones who do not assume today’s exemptions are permanent.

The bottom line

BC just pulled back from its most contested tax measure of the year, and condo owners and presale buyers are among the more direct beneficiaries, mainly through strata fees and development costs that were about to get more expensive for no operational reason. But paused is not repealed. Keep an eye on this file, because the pressure that created it in the first place has not gone anywhere.

If you want help thinking through how policy shifts like this factor into a specific project’s pricing or your own long-term ownership costs, register for VIP presale access at vancouverdwelling.ca. We track the fine print so you do not have to.

The Fed Just Hiked for the First Time Since 2023: What a Hawkish Turn Could Mean for Metro Vancouver Presale Buyers

On September 16 the U.S. Federal Reserve raised its benchmark rate by a quarter point to a range of 3.75 to 4 percent, its first hike in more than three years. The vote was unanimous, 12 to 0. Two days later, odds that the Bank of Canada follows with its own hike on October 28 have swung to roughly a coin flip, a sharp reversal from the 94 percent odds of a hold that markets were pricing just weeks ago. Nothing has actually changed yet in Canada. But the ground underneath the “rates are done rising” story that has comforted presale buyers all year just shifted, and it is worth understanding why before you assume the next move is a cut.

What actually happened on September 16

The Fed’s decision was driven by inflation the committee described as “elevated,” with energy prices doing much of the damage. The committee’s updated projections point to the possibility of another increase before the year is out. This was not a close call or a surprise dissent. Every voting member agreed, which tells you the concern about inflation is broad-based within the Fed, not a minority view being outvoted.

For Canadian buyers, a U.S. rate decision is not automatically a Canadian rate decision. The Bank of Canada sets policy based on Canadian inflation and Canadian growth, not to shadow Washington. But the two economies share enough plumbing, energy markets, bond markets, a tariff dispute that is not going away, that a genuine U.S. policy pivot rarely stays contained on one side of the border for long.

Why the Bank of Canada suddenly looks like a coin flip

The Bank of Canada has held its policy rate at 2.25 percent for seven straight decisions, most recently on September 2. Going into that meeting, markets priced a hold at 94 percent odds. That comfortable consensus has cracked. With the October 28 decision still more than a month away, odds now sit close to even, tilted narrowly toward a hike as of this week according to LSEG Data and Analytics pricing cited by RBC senior economist Claire Fan.

The reason is not the Fed decision itself so much as what is driving it: persistently high global oil prices tied to the conflict involving Iran. The Bank of Canada’s own summary of deliberations from its September 2 meeting shows governing council was already worried last month that elevated oil prices were staying higher for longer than expected. The longer that continues, the greater the risk it spreads from gas pumps into broader inflation. Rising global bond yields, partly tied to concerns over U.S. government debt, are spilling into Government of Canada bond yields too, and lenders use those bond yields to price fixed mortgage rates directly.

The big banks do not agree, and that matters

Here is the part worth sitting with. Four of Canada’s biggest banks, BMO, CIBC, RBC, and TD, expect the policy rate to hold at 2.25 percent through the rest of 2026, with any hike pushed into 2027. Two others, National Bank and Scotiabank, expect the Bank of Canada to move to 2.50 percent as early as October and to 2.75 percent before the year is out. Desjardins deputy chief economist Randall Bartlett and Capital Economics’ Stephen Brown both say their base case remains no hike in October, but both describe it as a genuinely close call rather than a confident hold.

A genuine split among major bank economists is itself a signal. It means the comfortable assumption many presale buyers have been running on, that the rate story from here is flat or downward, is no longer the consensus. It is one live scenario among several, and the scenario where rates move up is now credible enough that serious economists are debating timing in months, not years.

What a hawkish turn would actually do to your numbers

Start with what has already moved. The 5-year Government of Canada bond yield, the benchmark lenders use to price fixed mortgage rates, sat at 3.42 percent as of the Bank of Canada’s September 2 decision, up from 3.08 percent three months earlier. Fixed rates can drift higher even without the Bank of Canada lifting the overnight rate at all, purely on bond market pricing.

If the Bank of Canada does hike in October, Canada’s prime rate, currently 4.45 percent across the major banks, would move to roughly 4.70 percent, and every variable-rate mortgage and line of credit tied to prime would follow immediately. If the more hawkish forecasts play out over the following year, some rate forecasters have prime drifting toward the mid-5 percent range by mid-2027. That is a scenario, not a prediction, and the economists closest to the decision still lean toward the Bank holding in October. But a year ago, a scenario where rates rise from here would have sounded implausible to most buyers. Today it is a live debate inside the institutions that set these rates.

What this means for presale buyers

If your completion is more than a year out, stop assuming the rate you see quoted today is a ceiling. Stress test your purchase at your current qualifying rate plus 1 and plus 2 percentage points, not just at today’s rate, and make sure the payment still works at the higher number. A rate hold, where available, only protects you for a matter of months, so it does very little for a 2028 or 2029 completion regardless of which way this week’s headlines point.

If you are weighing a fixed versus variable mortgage on a near-completion unit, the bond market has already started pricing in more caution on the fixed side, so do not assume fixed necessarily means fully immune to what happens between now and your closing date. And if a hawkish turn genuinely worries you, the honest hedge is not trying to time the Bank of Canada. It is buying something you can still comfortably afford if the more cautious forecasts turn out to be wrong.

The bottom line

Nothing changed in Canada on September 16. What changed is the confidence behind the assumption that nothing will. The Bank of Canada’s own economists are now debating a hike in weeks rather than dismissing one for years, and that uncertainty alone is worth building into your numbers before you sign.

If you want help stress testing a specific presale contract against a range of rate scenarios, or you want early access to new launches before they go public, register for VIP presale access at vancouverdwelling.ca. We will run the math with you before you commit to anything.

Metro Vancouver’s $4.4 Billion Unsold Condo Problem, and What It Actually Means for Presale Buyers

A new report making the rounds this week puts a number on something Metro Vancouver presale buyers have felt for a while: developers are sitting on a mountain of finished condos nobody has bought. Real Property Data, a Vancouver analytics firm, estimates the region’s finished-but-unsold condo inventory is worth $4.4 billion. That is a striking figure on its own, but the detail underneath it is more useful to you than the headline number. This is not mostly a story about small investor units nobody wanted. It is a story about the expensive, larger homes at the top of the price sheet, and that changes what it means for anyone shopping presales right now.

The numbers behind the headline

Real Property Data’s $4.4 billion estimate is based on what comparable condos sold for in 2026. A separate analytics firm, Zonda Urban, independently counted just over 5,300 finished-but-unsold condos and townhomes across Metro Vancouver this week. Burnaby leads with 1,200 units, followed by Vancouver at 958, Richmond at 816, Surrey at 559, and the Coquitlam-Port Moody area at 543. More than 1,300 of these units are sitting in buildings that were completed at least two years ago, so this is not simply new stock still working through a normal sales cycle. It is aging, unsold inventory that developers are financing month after month while it waits for a buyer.

If that $4.4 billion figure looks familiar with a slightly different number attached, you may be thinking of an earlier report from Rennie, using CMHC and Zonda data back in April, that put the value at $4.6 billion. The two reports use different methodologies and snapshots in time, so treat them as two data points telling the same underlying story rather than a contradiction.

The surprising part: it is not the small units

Here is the detail that should reshape how you think about this. Darcy Rai, president of Real Property Data, found that larger condos of 1,500 square feet or more have a 41.6 percent unsold rate, compared with just 12.2 percent for units under 500 square feet. Three-bedroom condos have the highest unsold rate of any common unit type, at 27.3 percent, followed by two-bedroom units at 22.5 percent. One-bedroom condos sit at a comparatively low 13.7 percent. Andy Yan, director of the City program at Simon Fraser University, found a similar pattern from a different angle: more than 80 percent of the unsold units are priced above $1 million.

The explanation is straightforward once you see it. For the better part of a decade, presale buildings sold from the bottom of the price sheet up. Smaller, cheaper units moved first because more buyers could commit to them years ahead of completion based on a floor plan. What is left standing today is the larger, pricier end of each project, the units that fewer buyers were willing to gamble on sight unseen.

Why the expensive units are the ones stuck

Construction costs are the other half of this. Jon Bennest, vice-president of product development at Zonda Urban, points out that concrete highrises cost more to build than woodframe construction, which pushed developers to price those units at a premium to make the projects viable. Some Burnaby highrise units launched near the 2022 peak sold for as much as $1,400 a square foot. An end user shopping a comparable new condo in that same location today would likely pay closer to $1,000 to $1,100 a square foot. That gap is exactly why the units priced at yesterday’s peak are the ones sitting empty now, and it is also why some developers have quietly run flash sales and limited-time price reductions rather than a broad, public repricing.

Which developers are holding the most inventory

Real Property Data’s building-level breakdown names specific holders. Ledingham McAllister holds 722 finished-and-unsold units across six completed towers in Burnaby and Coquitlam, including 266 of 352 released units still unsold at Icon at Southgate City, a 46-storey tower completed about a year ago. Anthem Properties holds the next-highest count at 458 units. Westbank holds the highest unsold value of any single project, with 150 of 331 units unsold at The Butterfly downtown, though Westbank disputes that figure, telling Postmedia its unsold rate there is under 20 percent and that its remaining inventory is mostly one and two-bedroom homes starting around $1 million.

This is worth sitting with if you are considering a resale or an assignment in one of these buildings. A developer carrying hundreds of unsold units across multiple towers has real financing pressure, and financing pressure is exactly what produces flash sales, but it can also be a signal to do extra homework on that specific project’s lender relationships before you sign anything.

Where this overhang concentrates, and why

Bennest also flagged a geographic pattern that connects directly to Metro Vancouver’s transit-oriented building boom. A large share of the unsold inventory sits in highrise towers near SkyTrain corridors that saw heavy development over the past eight years, including Brentwood, Lougheed, Metrotown, Edmonds, and Burquitlam in Burnaby and Coquitlam, plus a concentration near Richmond’s Capstan Station on the Canada Line. BC’s transit-oriented density law (Bill 47) is still working through an uneven rollout two years after its compliance deadline, and this unsold inventory is the flip side of that same story: the towers already built near transit in the last cycle are exactly where the biggest oversupply of expensive units now sits.

What this means for buyers

If you are shopping a larger unit, a two or three-bedroom in particular, you are looking at the exact segment where developers have the least leverage and the most incentive to negotiate. That means room to ask about price adjustments, deposit structure, or upgrade credits on standing inventory in a way that was unthinkable during the 2021 to 2022 presale frenzy. It also means you should ask direct questions about how long a specific unit has been on the market and whether the building has had prior price reductions, since that history tells you more about your negotiating room than the listing price does. On the flip side, if a project’s inventory looks especially concentrated with one heavily exposed developer, treat that as a prompt to check the builder’s financial standing and the project’s lender before committing, not as a reason to avoid the deal outright.

The bottom line

The $4.4 billion figure making the rounds this week is real, but the useful story is underneath it: this is a story about pricey, large-format units built at peak construction costs, concentrated in specific towers and specific developers, not a broad collapse across every price point. For a presale buyer, that distinction is the difference between panic and opportunity.

If you want help figuring out whether a specific standing-inventory unit or new launch is priced for today’s market, or you want early notice before new presales go public, register for VIP presale access at vancouverdwelling.ca. We track the inventory data and the fine print so you can negotiate from a position of knowledge.

The Bank of Canada Held Rates Again. Here Is Why That Does Not Help Your 2028 Presale Completion

On September 2 the Bank of Canada held its overnight rate at 2.25 per cent. The Bank Rate stayed at 2.5 per cent, the deposit rate at 2.20 per cent, and the policy rate has now been unchanged since October 2025, when it came down from 2.50 per cent.

The commentary around the decision has been what you would expect. Mortgage brokers pointed out that discounted fixed rates are still available below 4 per cent. Industry associations called the hold a signal of stability. The standard advice arrived on cue: get a rate hold, lock in today’s pricing for up to 120 days, protect yourself from volatility.

That advice is fine if you are buying a resale condo in Kitsilano and closing in six weeks. If you are buying a Metro Vancouver presale that completes in 2028 or 2029, almost none of it applies to you, and I think the gap between the two situations is the single most underexplained thing in this market right now.

The rate hold everybody is discussing is one you cannot actually use

A rate hold is a lender’s commitment to honour a quoted rate for a fixed window, usually up to 120 days. Four months. That is the entire product.

Your presale completion is not in four months. It might be in thirty-six. When you sign a presale contract, you are agreeing to buy at a fixed price on a date the developer will confirm later, and you will arrange your mortgage close to that date, at whatever rates exist then. No lender will commit to a rate three years out, because no lender can price that risk.

So the September 2 hold tells you something about today’s borrowing environment. It tells you very little about the one you will actually borrow in. Presale buyers who feel reassured by a rate hold headline are reading a forecast that does not extend to their horizon.

What the decision does tell you is worth reading carefully. The Bank noted that the continuing conflict in the Middle East is keeping energy prices elevated, and that new U.S. tariffs and Canadian counter-measures followed the breakdown of trade talks. Headline CPI is running at 3.0 per cent. Unemployment edged down to 6.4 per cent in July, but the Bank still sees continued excess supply in the economy.

That is a central bank pinned between two risks it cannot resolve at once. Ratehub’s Jamie David framed it as the Bank having “little room to move aggressively in either direction.” Two decisions remain this year, on October 28 and December 9. Anyone telling you confidently what happens after that is guessing.

What actually determines the rate you complete at

Three things, and the policy rate is only loosely connected to the first.

Fixed mortgage rates track government bond yields, not the overnight rate. That is why fixed pricing can move in a week the Bank does nothing. As of the September decision, the lowest discounted five-year fixed was around 4.09 per cent, with two-year fixed near 3.89 per cent and three-year near 3.94 per cent. Where those sit in 2028 depends on where bond yields go, and bond yields will respond to the trade conflict and to energy prices as much as to anything the Bank announces.

Variable rates do follow the policy rate, through prime, which most major banks are holding at 4.45 per cent. The lowest discounted five-year variable was around 3.35 per cent at the September decision.

Your own qualifying position is the third piece, and it is the one you can control. Lenders qualify you at a rate above your contract rate under the federal stress test, and they re-underwrite you at completion, not at signing. Your income, your other debts, your credit and your down payment all get looked at again, years after you signed. I have seen more presale completions get difficult because a buyer’s income situation changed than because rates moved.

The question to ask instead

Not “where will rates be.” Nobody knows. The better question is: at what rate does this purchase stop working for me?

Take the purchase price, subtract your deposit, and run the payment at 5 per cent, at 6 per cent, at 7 per cent. If the number at 6 per cent makes you uncomfortable, you have learned something concrete and useful about the size of unit you should be shopping for. That exercise takes ten minutes and it is worth more than any forecast.

Then do the same for the deposit schedule. Most Metro Vancouver presales run 15 to 20 per cent staged over 6 to 18 months, though a number of projects are currently offering 10 per cent structures. Those instalments come due on contract dates regardless of what the Bank of Canada does.

If you want the mechanics of how completion, financing and contract dates fit together, the pages of a 200-page presale contract that actually matter covers the clauses involved, and presale versus completed new construction is the honest comparison if the financing timeline is what is bothering you. A completed home you can finance today sidesteps this entire problem.

Market Signals

The sale. On August 26 the Harvard Apartments at 1240 St. George Avenue in North Vancouver’s Central Lonsdale sold for $12,250,000, or $382,813 per unit at a 4.0 per cent cap rate, according to vancouvermarket.ca. It is a 32-suite, three-storey wood-frame walk-up built in 1970, on an 18,077 square foot corner lot directly across from Lions Gate Hospital, zoned RM-1 for medium-density apartment residential use. Cushman Wakefield listed and sold it.

A 4.0 per cent cap rate on 1970 wood-frame stock is aggressive. For comparison, the Twin Lakes townhome portfolio traded three weeks earlier at 4.7 per cent. I am not going to attach a storey count or an FSR to this site: RM-1 is what is on the record today, and the City of North Vancouver has an active planning process reimagining the Central Lonsdale corridor, so the density that will eventually govern sites like this is still being written. What the price tells you is that patient capital is buying the land under old rental buildings on the North Shore, and that is usually two to three cycles ahead of any presale launch.

Builder watch. Closer to home for presale buyers, Portwood Development 3 Limited Partnership and Portwood Development 4 Limited Partnership obtained CCAA protection on August 14, 2026 on application by affiliates of Woodbourne Canada Management Inc., which were owed roughly $125 million as of August 17. The debtors own Phases 3, 4 and 5 of Woodland Park, a five-phase Port Moody residential project originally assembled in 2018 for about $97.5 million. Phase 3 is roughly 3.28 acres at 1218 Cecile Drive with permits for about 158,000 square feet of multi-family rental. Phases 4 and 5 total about 13.65 acres, rezoned for residential, with 96 townhomes on them. PwC is the monitor, and it is asking the court to approve a sale process backed by a stalking horse bid.

Two details are instructive. First, the phases are legally interdependent: under the development agreement with the City of Port Moody, Phase 3 has to be materially advanced before much of Phases 4 and 5 can be occupied. A master-planned community is not five independent projects, and trouble in one phase can stall the ones you bought into. Second, the petitioners deliberately chose CCAA over receivership partly because receivership over the title nominee could have triggered purchaser rescission rights under B.C. real estate legislation. Even the lenders are now structuring around presale buyer protections. That is a real shift.

What this means for buyers

Stop treating the Bank of Canada calendar as your buying signal. Two decisions are left this year and neither will change the arithmetic of a 2028 completion.

Do this instead. Stress-test your own purchase at 6 and 7 per cent before you sign, not the rate you are quoted today. Map the deposit instalment dates onto your actual cash flow. Ask the developer’s sales team directly what happens to your completion date if the project slips, and read what the contract says rather than what you are told. Look at who is financing the project and how many phases the plan depends on, because Port Moody is a live reminder that phasing risk is real. And if the financing uncertainty is genuinely what is keeping you up, seriously consider completed inventory, where you can finance today at a rate you can actually see.

The buyers who do well in this market are not the ones who timed the Bank of Canada. They are the ones who bought something they could still afford if they were wrong about rates.

Considering a Metro Vancouver presale?

I track 481 developments across 14 cities, 265 of them selling right now, and I will run the completion math with you before you sign anything. If you want an honest read on a specific project, including its phasing and who is behind the financing, book a call or register for VIP presale access. No pitch, just the spreadsheet.