Ottawa needs a 9% autumn just to break even on 2026

The number that got buried under a good July headline

OREB's July release led with the sales figure and it was a decent one. 1,325 homes sold, up 0.2% from last July, the best July Ottawa has had in five years. Almost nobody wrote about the line sitting underneath it.

Year to date, Ottawa has sold 8,288 homes through seven months. That is down 5.2% from the same stretch of 2025.

Both things are true at once. Only one of them tells you anything about the year.

What 5.2% costs, converted into actual houses

Percentages are easy to nod along to. Convert it.

If we are 5.2% below last year's seven-month pace and this year's count is 8,288, last year's was about 8,743. The gap is roughly 455 sales. That is Ottawa's hole with five months left on the calendar.

Here is the part I have not seen anyone run. What does the rest of 2026 have to do to close it?

Ottawa sold 13,526 homes in 2024. OREB reported that 2025 finished 1.3% higher than 2024 on total sales, which puts last year around 13,700. Pull the seven-month figure out of that and the final five months of 2025 were worth roughly 4,959 sales.

For 2026 to finish level with 2025, Ottawa needs about 5,414 sales between August and December.

5,414 against 4,959 is a 9% increase. Every month. August through December. That gets us to break even, not to growth.

I flexed the inputs to see how fragile the number is, because these boards revise historical counts as late sales get reported. Move the 2025 annual growth rate, move the year-to-date revision, and the answer stays between 8.5% and 10%. It is not a knife-edge result.

Where the hole came from

The deficit is not spread evenly, which matters a lot if you own a specific kind of property.

CREA's board-level data puts Ottawa's second quarter at 3,885 sales, down 6.6% year over year. Underneath that number: detached down 4.1%, townhouse and row down 8.5%, apartments down 10.8%.

Freehold took a scratch. Attached took the hit. That lines up with what the benchmark prices have been saying all summer. Single-family sits at $725,000, up 0.7% on the year. Townhouses are $542,500, down 5.1%. Apartments are $385,500, down 5.2%. I wrote the townhouse version of this earlier in the month and the condo version before it.

If you own a detached home in Ottawa, 2026 has been mildly disappointing. If you own a condo, 2026 is where your equity went.

Meanwhile the national forecast has Ontario as the bright spot

This is the part that made me want to write the post.

CREA updated its national forecast on July 15. Nationally it expects 463,336 sales in 2026, a 1.4% decline from 2025. Then this line: Ontario is now the only province forecast to see annual sales increase in 2026 compared to 2025.

The only one. Out of ten.

Ottawa is one of the biggest markets in the province and we are running 5.2% behind. So either the forecast is wrong, or the increase is happening elsewhere in Ontario and Ottawa is being carried by it.

I think it is the second one, and CREA's own August release backs that up. When their senior economist listed the regions returning to balance, he named the Prairies, Quebec, the East Coast, BC's Lower Mainland, and Ontario's Greater Golden Horseshoe. Ottawa was not on the list.

That should change how you read a national headline. "Canadian home sales climb again" was accurate on August 18. It was describing the Golden Horseshoe. It was not describing Barrhaven.

The rate relief that forecast assumes just moved further out

CREA's second-half recovery rests on borrowing costs behaving themselves. Statistics Canada published July CPI on August 17 and it landed at 3.0%, up from 2.8% in June. Gasoline was up 25.7% year over year after the Strait of Hormuz blockade and the partial closure of Red Sea shipping routes.

The fair read is that this is an oil shock rather than a broad inflation problem. CPI excluding gasoline came in at 2.2% for the third consecutive month. Core is fine.

But the Bank of Canada has now held at 2.25% through six straight announcements, and a 3.0% headline print two weeks before the September 2 decision creates zero urgency to cut. Bond markets are pricing a hold. Back on August 10 I argued that waiting for a rate cut was a bad plan. Nothing in the two weeks since has made waiting look smarter.

What a 9% autumn would actually take

I want to be careful here, because this is not a collapse story and I am not going to sell it as one.

1,325 July sales is 10.8% above the five-year average for the month. Prices are close to flat, with the year-to-date average at $699,761, down 0.4%, and the composite benchmark at $634,000, off half a percent. Demand in this city is fine.

But a 9% year-over-year lift sustained across five consecutive months is not something Ottawa produces out of nowhere, and it would have to happen while active listings sit at 4,678. That is the highest July count in a decade and 44.5% above the ten-year average, which I went through yesterday. Buyers with that much selection do not manufacture urgency. They browse.

So my read is that 2026 finishes down, somewhere in the 2% to 4% range on annual sales, absent a September or October cut that nobody is currently forecasting.

What to do with this if you own something

If you are selling this fall, stop pricing against the spring. The buyer pool that has to absorb your listing has been running smaller than last year's every month of 2026, and it is choosing from a decade-high pile of inventory. Your competition is not the three houses on your street. It is the 4,678 already sitting there, and the fall market is not going to rescue a listing that is priced wrong.

If you are buying, this arithmetic is working in your favour and it is unusually legible right now. A market that needs a 9% surge and is not going to get one is a market where a reasonable offer gets a serious answer, particularly on anything attached. Worth a look through what is actually available before the September rate decision resets everyone's mood.

I will rerun this same calculation when OREB publishes the August numbers in the first week of September. If the gap has widened past 500 sales, the flat-year conversation is over and we start talking about how far down instead.

Want to know what this means for your street, your building, or the one house you are actually trying to move? That is a fifteen minute phone call, not another market report. Reach me at 613-262-6545 or fil@613realtor.ca.