Canada's supply is 1.5% above normal. Ottawa's is 44.5%.

Canada's July numbers landed Tuesday and I owe you a follow up

Last Sunday I wrote that the way most people compare Ottawa to the national market is broken. Stacking our months of inventory against Canada's tells you almost nothing, because the two markets sit on different baselines. The honest test is each market measured against its own history.

At the time I only had Canada's June package. CREA published July on Tuesday, so both sides of the comparison are finally the same month, and the release happens to contain a number that makes the point better than anything I wrote last week.

CREA defined a seller's market, and Ottawa qualifies

Buried in the middle of the July release is this. Nationally there were 4.7 months of inventory at the end of July, the lowest reading so far in 2026 and slightly below the long term average of five months. Then CREA does something it rarely spells out. It publishes the distribution. One standard deviation either side of that five month average puts a seller's market below 3.6 months, a buyer's market above 6.4.

Ottawa finished July at 3.5 months.

So by the yardstick CREA printed on Tuesday, Ottawa is a seller's market. Under the threshold.

That is nonsense, and I am walking you into it on purpose. Those bands describe how the national number is distributed around the national average. Applying them to a city whose own July norm is 2.4 months is precisely the error I spent last Sunday arguing against. It is also the error a lot of Ottawa marketing will make over the next few weeks, because 3.5 is a low looking number and the national release just handed everybody a threshold to hold it against.

Measured against Ottawa's own July history, 3.5 months is the loosest this city has been in a decade.

The cleanest comparison in the two releases

Put months of inventory aside and just count listings. That measure needs no ratio and no seasonal adjustment, so there is nowhere for an argument to hide.

Canada ended July with 205,388 active listings. CREA's own words: up 0.6% from a year earlier and just 1.5% above the long term average for that time of year. National supply has been sliding sideways near normal levels for over a year.

Ottawa ended July with 4,678 active listings. OREB's own words: up 9.3% year over year, the highest July total in a decade, 29.5% above the five year average and 44.5% above the ten year average.

Same measure, same month, same concept of normal. One market is 1.5% above its baseline. The other is 44.5% above its baseline.

One caveat, and I would rather hand it to you than have you find it. CREA does not publish the window behind its long term average, and OREB is explicitly quoting ten years, so the two baselines are not built identically. Use Ottawa's friendlier five year figure of 29.5% and the ratio is still close to twenty to one. Use the ten year figure and it is nearly thirty to one. The comparison survives the caveat.

Not a Canada problem, and not an Ontario problem either

The obvious defence is that everywhere is carrying extra supply right now and Ottawa just happens to be at the front of the line. Tuesday's release closes that door.

Shaun Cathcart, CREA's senior economist, spent his quote describing markets moving back toward balance, and he named them: the Prairies, Quebec, the East Coast, BC's Lower Mainland, and Ontario's Greater Golden Horseshoe. Ottawa is not on the list.

Then there is the provincial line. CREA notes that Ontario's months of inventory sat only about half a standard deviation above average in July, after spending the first four months of 2026 in outright buyer's market conditions. I am not going to convert that into months, because CREA does not publish Ontario's average or its spread and I am not inventing them. Directionally it is clear enough. Ontario normalized. We did not.

Which leaves the Ottawa overhang as an Ottawa story.

We are beating the country on everything except supply

Here is the part that cuts against the alarmed version of this post, so I want it in writing.

Sales. Canada was down 5.3% year over year in July. Ottawa was up 0.2%, our best July in five years. Both are actual figures rather than seasonally adjusted ones, so it is a fair fight.

Prices. The national composite MLS Home Price Index was down 3.3% year over year. Ottawa's composite benchmark was down 0.5% to $634,000, and single family, which is most of this market, was up 0.7% to $725,000.

On demand we are outperforming. On price we are outperforming by a wide margin. The only measure where Ottawa looks materially worse than the country is the one counting unsold product sitting on the board. Worth holding onto that before you read the next section as bad news.

Canada took the price cut. Ottawa took the inventory instead.

The most under covered line in Tuesday's release is this one. The national composite index rose 0.1% from June to July, the first monthly increase in that measure since November 2024. Twenty months of grinding downward, and it turned. It turned after a 3.3% annual decline. The country repriced, supply stayed near normal the entire way through, and the market is now finding a floor.

Ottawa did the opposite thing. We held price to within half a percent and let the unsold listings stack up instead. Those are two different ways of absorbing the same demand shock, and only one of them has resolved itself.

I am not going to tell you Ottawa's benchmark is about to fall 3%. I do not know that, and anybody who says they do is selling something. Here is the narrower claim I will stand behind: a market cannot hold a flat price and a decade high listing count at the same time forever. One of those numbers moves. Either buyers turn up this fall and eat the backlog, or the sellers who actually need to transact start meeting the market. There is no third door.

What I would do with this

If you are selling, stop pricing off a benchmark that is down half a percent. That number is real and it is also flattered by the fact that a lot of Ottawa's overpriced inventory never trades, so it never marks anything. You are competing against 4,678 listings, not against an index. Nothing in Tuesday's release changes what I said about the fall market not rescuing an unsold listing.

If you are buying, this is the strongest position Ottawa buyers have had in ten years, and it is invisible if you only read the price headline. Your leverage is not in the benchmark. It is in the age of the listing you pick, which is why the homes that already failed once are where the discount lives. To see what is currently sitting, start with what is on the board.

Either way, two dates. OREB's August numbers land in the first week of September, and CREA's next national package is Tuesday, September 15. If Ottawa's active listing count is still running more than 40% above its own norm after the August print, the question stops being whether price moves and turns into when.

Want to know where your particular street or building sits inside all of this, rather than the citywide average? That is a fifteen minute phone call, not a report. Reach me at 613-262-6545 or fil@613realtor.ca.