Ottawa is finishing more homes than it's starting

The number nobody printed

Every month, Councillor Jeff Leiper's office publishes the CMHC construction data for Ottawa. It is one of the more useful documents in this city and almost nobody outside the planning world reads it. The July 31 update has a line in it worth more than most of what got written about Ottawa housing in July.

From January to June 2026, Ottawa completed 4,362 housing units. Over the same six months, it started 4,120.

We finished more homes than we began. Not by a lot, but the direction of the two lines is the story. Completions are running above last year's 3,688 and back in the normal band with 2024 and 2023, which came in at 4,209 and 4,107. Starts went the other way: 4,120 this year against 4,629 through June 2025, off about 11%.

Everyone in Ottawa is currently talking about how much choice buyers have. That choice is the front end of the pipeline arriving. The back end is getting thinner.

Eighty-four per cent of the pipeline is apartments

There were 15,646 units under construction in Ottawa in June, essentially flat from 15,731 in May and up from 15,139 a year earlier. So the pipeline itself has not shrunk yet. What is in it matters more than how big it is.

Of those 15,646 units: 907 singles, 205 semis, 1,332 rows, and 13,202 apartments.

Read that again. Apartments are 84% of everything currently under construction in this city. Singles are under 6%. If you are waiting for new supply to loosen up the detached market in Barrhaven or Kanata, there are 907 detached units under construction across the entire City of Ottawa. That is not a market-moving number in a city that sold 879 single-family homes in the month of June alone.

This is the same structural point I made about small-bay industrial a couple of days ago, and it rhymes: the thing being built is not the thing that is scarce.

The stuff finishing now was ordered under different math

CMHC put out its Spring Housing Supply Report in March and the Ottawa paragraph is the part I keep going back to. Rental units dominated construction here and pushed total starts to near-record levels, helped along by incentives for transit-oriented development. Medium-density and missing-middle housing, including conversions, hit new highs in 2025.

Then the caveat, in CMHC's own words: those results "reflect investment decisions made several years ago under more favourable financing conditions, with recent starts trending lower. As a result, we expect supply to tighten over time as demand also recovers with improving economic conditions."

That is the national housing agency saying the quiet part. An apartment building takes roughly two to four years from shovel to occupancy. The towers topping out in Ottawa this year were financed and committed in 2022 and 2023. The 11% drop in starts through June is not a 2026 problem. It is a 2028 and 2029 problem, and it arrives at exactly the moment demand is expected to be better than it is now.

Where you can see it in the resale numbers

OREB's June release had months of inventory at 3.3, up from 2.8 last June. Break it down by type and the completion wave shows up exactly where you would expect it to.

Single-family sat at 2.8 months with a benchmark down 0.7% year over year. Townhomes were at 3.2, down 3.9%. Apartments were at 5.3 months with the benchmark down 6.0%.

The apartment segment is carrying almost all of Ottawa's price softness, and the apartment segment is where 13,202 units are currently finishing. That is not a coincidence and it is not a mystery.

Worth noting what did not break. The sale-to-list ratio held at 98.5%, unchanged from June 2025, and median days on market moved from 19 to 22. More supply, same pricing discipline. Ottawa is absorbing this, just slowly and unevenly.

The rental number that complicates all of it

Here is where I have to be honest about a tension in the data rather than pick the number that suits the argument.

CMHC's 2025 rental survey put Ottawa's purpose-built vacancy rate at 3.0%, with average rent of $1,926. The condominium apartment vacancy rate was 0.6%, with average rent of $2,503. Six-tenths of one per cent is not a functioning market. It is a lineup.

But that survey is an October 2025 snapshot, and I wrote in late July that Ottawa asking rents have been sliding and incentives are widespread. Both are true. The purpose-built side is where the new completions landed and where the softening is real. The condo rental side is a smaller, tighter pool that has not loosened the same way.

For an owner, that gap is the whole decision. A condo you cannot sell at your number in a 5.3-month market may still rent in a week.

What I'd actually do with this

If you are buying a condo or a townhouse, this is your window and it is a real one. Competition from new completions is doing your negotiating for you, and it does not last forever. I walked through how to shop that market here.

If you are buying detached, stop waiting for new supply to help you. Nine hundred units under construction citywide is not relief. Whatever leverage you get in that segment will come from rates and seasonality, not inventory. Browse what's actually listed and work with the stock that exists.

If you are selling an apartment, price against the building down the street that is finishing this fall, not against what your neighbour got in 2022.

And if your horizon is five years rather than five months, the starts number is the one to file away. Ottawa is drawing down a pipeline it is not refilling at the same rate. That is a fine environment to buy into and a poor one to assume will still be there when you go looking.

I read this data every month so you don't have to, and I'm happy to tell you what it means for your street specifically rather than for the city average. Call me at 613-262-6545 or email fil@613realtor.ca and we'll go through it.