Ottawa Centre has 7 months of inventory. Suburb West has 3.6.

Ottawa's market is balanced. Nobody lives in the average.

The August numbers landed on the third and the citywide read is balanced. Sales to new listings at 47.3 per cent. Four and a half months of inventory. Homes selling at 97.9 per cent of list. Stop there and you would tell a client the market is fine and a little slow.

Now split the city into the six submarkets OREB actually reports.

Ottawa Centre finished August with 7.0 months of inventory. Ottawa Suburb West finished with 3.6. Same month, same board, same release. One of them is nearly double the other.

Two of the six are buyers' markets by the standard definition

CREA's own framing puts a sales-to-new-listings ratio between 45 and 65 per cent in balanced territory. Below 45 is a buyers' market. Above 65 is a sellers' market.

Run Ottawa's six through it.

Ottawa Rural West 62.3 per cent. Ottawa Suburb West 51.9. Citywide 47.3. Ottawa Rural East 40.6. Ottawa Centre 38.2. Suburb East and Suburb South both came in under the citywide number, though OREB did not publish their ratios.

Rural East and Ottawa Centre are below the line. Not near it, below it. That is a buyers' market by the definition the national association uses, in two of the six pieces of a city whose headline number reads balanced.

Top to bottom the spread is 24.1 percentage points, in a single month.

And the citywide 47.3 is not sitting comfortably in the middle of that band. It is 2.3 points above the floor. One more August and the headline number is in buyers' territory too.

Ottawa Centre is holding inventory it cannot clear

OREB publishes sales, the ratio and months of inventory by submarket. It does not publish active listings by submarket. Months of inventory is actives divided by sales, so you can back it out.

Ottawa Centre sold 81 homes in August at 7.0 months. That implies roughly 570 active listings. Ottawa Rural East sold 84 at 6.5 months, roughly 545.

Put those two together. About 165 sales, which is one sale in six citywide. About 1,110 active listings, which is a quarter of every active listing in Ottawa.

Sixteen per cent of the sales, twenty-five per cent of the inventory. That is the whole thing in two numbers.

Same point from the seller's side. For Ottawa Centre to absorb what it is holding at Suburb West's pace, it would need roughly 158 sales a month instead of 81. The buyers are not short by ten per cent. They are short by half.

To be clear about what is mine and what is OREB's: the 570 and the 545 are my arithmetic. The sales counts and the inventory months are theirs. If either gets revised, so do my numbers.

Rural West is the exception, and it is a small one

The only submarket with a year-over-year sales increase was Ottawa Rural West, up 22.6 per cent, with the highest ratio in the city at 62.3 per cent. That is a real result and it is the one people are going to quote at me.

It came on 76 transactions.

OREB flags this itself in the release, that the percentage should be read cautiously given how small a share of citywide activity it represents. Seventy-six sales is a number where a dozen closings move the ratio several points. I would not price a listing off it, and I would not tell a client that rural west Ottawa has decoupled from the rest of the city on one month of data.

What I will say is that absorption was firmer in the west, suburban and rural both, and softer in the centre and the east. That pattern is worth watching. The 22.6 is not.

The property type split is the same weakness wearing different clothes

Apartments recorded 6.3 months of inventory in August, a 43.0 per cent ratio and a median 42 days on market. Townhouses sat at 4.1 months with active listings 27.1 per cent above last year and a benchmark 4.0 per cent lower. Single-family was at 4.0 months with a benchmark up 2.2 per cent.

Now notice that Ottawa Centre's 7.0 months and the apartment segment's 6.3 are describing a lot of the same stock. The centre is where the condos are. These are not two separate weak corners of the market. It is one, counted twice, once by geography and once by building type.

CREA's July figures give the dollar scale. Benchmark single-family $725,000. Townhouse $542,500. Apartment $385,500. At that point the single-family benchmark was up 0.7 per cent on the year while townhouses were down 5.1 and apartments down 5.2.

I made the townhouse case a month ago and the condo appraisal case before that. August did not change either one. It added a map.

What you actually do with this

If you are listing, throw out the citywide number. A seller in Ottawa Centre pricing off 4.5 months of inventory and a 97.9 per cent sale-to-list ratio is pricing into a market that has 7.0 months and a 38.2 per cent ratio. That is not a rounding error. That is the difference between closing in October and joining the roughly 1,300 listings that quit in August.

If you are buying, the leverage is geographic and it is measurable. Centre and Rural East carry about twice the sitting inventory per sale that the west suburbs do. Ask for the submarket figure before you write an offer, not the city one.

And treat the citywide average the way you should treat every average in this business. I have written about why the average price tells you less than the benchmark and about reading inventory against its own normal. This is the third version of the same lesson. The citywide figure is a weighted blend of six markets, and in August the gap between the firmest and the softest was 3.4 months of inventory. That is about 103 days of difference folded into one number that gets quoted as though it describes everybody.

Ottawa does not have a housing market. It has six.

Want the ratio and the months of inventory for your actual submarket instead of the city blend? Give me the postal code and I will pull it. 613-262-6545 or fil@613realtor.ca. Or look at what is sitting and count the days on market yourself.