Ottawa sold 1,002 homes in August. About 1,300 listings quit.

I said I would rerun the numbers. Here they are.

Three weeks ago I showed you that more Ottawa listings quit the market in July than sold in it, roughly 1,500 exits against 1,325 sales, and promised to run the same arithmetic on the August release. It landed Thursday.

Second month running, and worse.

The arithmetic

OREB publishes four numbers that make this possible. Active listings ended July at 4,678. August added 2,119 new listings. August sales came in at 1,002. If nothing had left the market except by selling, Ottawa would have finished August with 5,795 active listings.

It finished with 4,496.

The gap is about 1,300 listings that left the market without a sale. Against 1,002 sales, that is 1.3 unsold exits for every closed deal, up from 1.1 in July. Put another way, of everything that came off the Ottawa market in August, about 56% came off without a buyer.

Same caveats as last time. Active listings is a point-in-time count and new listings includes re-lists, so treat it as 1,200 to 1,400 rather than 1,299. The direction and the size are not in doubt.

Add the two months together and roughly 2,800 Ottawa listings have quit since Canada Day, against about 2,300 that sold.

This time the board said it too

In August I wrote that nobody publishes this stat. Still true, but OREB came closer than it ever has. The release says its own review of listing records found terminations, cancellations and expiries became more prominent relative to completed transactions through the summer, and that in August "a greater proportion of properties left the market without producing a sale."

It also says those non-sale removals declined from July while sales fell more sharply. That is exactly what the reconstruction shows: exits down about 14%, sales down 24.4%. When the board's description and the back-of-envelope math land in the same place, I trust the math more.

The one thing OREB will not do is put a number on it. So here is the number: about 1,300.

Why August is different from July

In July, both sides of the market shrank and supply shrank faster, so the sales-to-new-listings ratio improved to 52.4% for the wrong reason. I called it a denominator effect and said the real test was August.

August was the real test. New listings fell 16.2% from July, which OREB describes as a normal seasonal move. Sales fell 24.4%. The board's own ten-year median for the July-to-August sales drop is 5.8%, so this year's was four times normal. The ratio fell to 47.3%, and this time it fell for the right reason: buyers stepped back.

Months of inventory went from 3.5 to 4.5 in a single month. Over the previous ten years the median July-to-August change was zero and the biggest increase was 0.4. A jump of 1.0 is not summer noise. It is the highest August reading since 2016, on the lowest August sales count since 2016, tied with 2022.

And the weakness spread. Earlier this year the soft segments were townhouses and condos. In August single-family sales fell 16.3%, townhouses 19.9%, apartments 22.3%. All three suburbs were down: West 14.3%, East 20.0%, South 25.1%. Rural West was the only submarket up, on 76 sales.

The year is now about 690 sales behind

On August 24 I worked out that Ottawa was 455 sales behind 2025 and needed a 9% autumn to break even. I said that if the gap widened past 500 after the August release, the flat-year framing was dead.

Year-to-date sales are 9,283, down 6.9%. The gap is about 690 sales. Breaking even now needs September through December to run 18% ahead of last year, in a market that just printed 18.6% behind.

I also said 2026 would finish down 2% to 4% on sales. That was too optimistic and I am correcting it now. Down 4% would need a September-to-December stretch about 4% ahead of 2025. Flat from here finishes the year down 5%. A fall that runs 5% to 10% behind, which is closer to what August looked like, finishes down 6% to 8%. That is my revised call, down 6% to 8%, and hold me to it in January.

Prices held, and that is the same story

The composite benchmark was $637,700, up 1.0% on the year and 0.6% on the month. The single-family benchmark was up 2.2%. Homes sold at 97.9% of list, unchanged from last August, and median days on market went from 28 to 29.

Sales down 18.6% and prices up 1.0% looks like a contradiction. It is not. It is what 1,300 withdrawals look like. Last week I made the case that Ottawa's supply is optional, not forced, because the arrears data says almost nobody here has to sell. Forced sellers cut the price. Optional sellers cancel the listing. Ottawa sellers are cancelling, so the benchmark holds and the exit count climbs instead.

That is also why 97.9% of list tells you less than it seems to. It only counts the homes that sold, measured against whatever the list price was on the day of the offer. The 1,300 that quit produced no ratio at all.

The exception is townhouses. Active townhouse listings are 27.1% above last year, the benchmark is down 4.0%, and OREB flagged the segment as one to watch closely. I flagged it a month ago. That is the one segment where sellers are taking the price cut instead of the exit.

What this means for the next eight weeks

If you are listing this fall, your competition is the 2,800 listings that quit over the summer. OREB's release closes by asking whether they come back this fall with new pricing. Some will, with a September number and a showing history a buyer's agent can pull in ten seconds. You are pricing against them, not against the 97.9% survivors. The fall calendar does not fix a price. Only the price does.

If you are buying, the leverage is in the specific listing, not in the market. The homes that came off and are coming back are the best inventory in the city, because the seller has already learned what the market would not pay. Work the days on market and the price history. Do not wait for distress that the arrears data says is not coming.

And do not wait for the Bank. It held at 2.25% on Wednesday for the seventh straight time, said financial conditions have tightened since July, and does not meet again until October 28. There is no rescue on the calendar.

Want the exit count for your segment or your street instead of the citywide version? That is a fifteen-minute call with the listing records open. 613-262-6545 or fil@613realtor.ca. Or see what is still on the market and count the days yourself.