If you own a condo in Richmond Hill, Markham or Vaughan, you have probably read a lot this year about the Toronto condo market. Prices down, listings piling up, investors underwater. And you may have read it at a certain distance, because that coverage is almost always about the city, and you are not in the city.
If you have been quietly wondering what your own place is worth after a year like that, it is a reasonable thing to wonder, and you have not been given much to go on. The regional headline number does not describe your municipality, let alone your building.
So let me put the July figures for our own towns in front of you. Some of it is uncomfortable. I would rather you hear it now than discover it the week you list.
What the July numbers say about our municipalities
Here is the apartment benchmark from the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board’s MLS Home Price Index, July 2026 against July 2025:
| Where | Apartment benchmark, year over year |
|---|---|
| City of Toronto | down 7.09% |
| Greater Toronto Area | down 7.35% |
| York Region | down 9.20% |
| Aurora | down 12.27% |
| Richmond Hill | down 11.86% |
| Newmarket | down 11.28% |
| Markham | down 10.86% |
| Vaughan | down 5.44% |
Four of the five York Region municipalities I work in saw condo values fall further than the City of Toronto did. Not marginally: Richmond Hill’s decline was roughly two thirds larger than the city’s.
The regional sales counts point in the same direction. Across the whole TRREB area, condo apartment sales in the City of Toronto rose 3.3 per cent from a year earlier, while condo apartment sales in the 905 fell 6.6 per cent. One note of precision, because it matters: TRREB’s “905” here means everything outside the city, so Peel, Durham and Halton as well as York. It is a regional figure, not a York Region one.
Why the region-wide figure hides this
This is not a conspiracy, it is arithmetic. Two thirds of the region’s condo sales happen in the City of Toronto - in July, 1,054 of the 1,564 condo apartment sales across the entire TRREB area. Coverage follows the volume, so the city’s condo story becomes “the Toronto condo story,” and the region-wide figures most outlets quote sit far closer to the city’s experience than to Aurora’s or Richmond Hill’s.
A market with seven monthly sales does not get a headline. That is how a municipality can move sharply and stay invisible.
Two cautions about these numbers
I would rather you trust this piece in six months than be impressed by it today, so two things need saying plainly.
Aurora and Newmarket are small condo markets. There were 7 condo apartment sales in Aurora in July, and 6 in Newmarket. The Home Price Index is a modelled measure and holds up better in a thin market than an average would, but at those volumes I would treat both figures as directional rather than precise. Richmond Hill, Markham and Vaughan recorded 33, 63 and 73 sales, which gives those readings considerably more weight.
One month is not a trend. This is a single year-over-year reading from a single release. It is a real signal about where things stand today, and it is not a forecast. The next monthly TRREB release will update it.
Vaughan shows why the property type matters as much as the town
Vaughan was the exception on condos, down 5.44 per cent, a smaller decline than either the city or the GTA. Look at the same municipality by a different property type and it reverses. Here are the townhouse benchmarks for the same month:
| Where | Townhouse benchmark, year over year |
|---|---|
| Greater Toronto Area | down 6.18% |
| City of Toronto | down 5.75% |
| York Region | down 9.01% |
| Vaughan | down 11.28% |
| Markham | down 11.17% |
| Richmond Hill | down 6.79% |
| Aurora | down 6.60% |
| Newmarket | down 4.86% |
Vaughan has the mildest condo decline of the five and the steepest townhouse decline. Newmarket, which had one of the harder condo readings, has the mildest townhouse one and the only figure in the table better than the GTA.
There is no such thing as “the market” at the level anyone actually makes a decision. There is your property type, in your municipality, and often your specific building. The further a number gets from that, the less it is about you.
Richmond Hill has a signature worth understanding
My own home base behaved distinctively in July, and it is the clearest illustration of what an average hides.
Across all home types, Richmond Hill had the loosest conditions of the five: a sales-to-new-listings ratio of 33.1 per cent against the GTA’s 37.1, and 5.6 months of inventory against the GTA’s 4.6. Homes took 37 days to sell on average, against 32 across the region. By every one of those measures it was slower than the GTA and slower than Markham next door, which sat at 39.4 per cent and 4.2 months.
And yet Richmond Hill homes that sold went for 99 per cent of their asking price, above the GTA’s 97 per cent.
Those two facts look contradictory and they are not. The plainest reading is a market where well-priced homes trade close to ask, and everything else sits. Buyers were not grinding sellers down last month - a market like that would show sales closing well below asking, and July’s closed at 99 per cent of it. What the numbers are consistent with is buyers declining to engage with anything they judged overpriced, and waiting for the next listing.
If you are pricing a Richmond Hill listing, July’s evidence is worth sitting with: last month, the list price behaved less like an opening position in a negotiation and more like the thing that decided whether a negotiation happened at all.
What I would do with this
If you own a condo in York Region, your unit may have moved further than the coverage suggests, and the way to find out is recent local comparables for your building and its neighbours. Not a regional headline, and not what the unit downstairs got last spring.
If you are buying a condo here, the same numbers that are uncomfortable for owners give you room. In July, Richmond Hill had 207 condo apartments listed for sale and 33 sold; Vaughan, 466 against 73; Markham, 357 against 63. Selection like that buys you time, and the place to spend it is the building, not just the unit: buying a condo means buying into a corporation’s finances as well as a home, and a thin reserve fund is exactly the kind of thing to discover before your offer rather than after. I have written a longer piece on what a well-run condo building actually looks like.
If you own here as an investor, the municipal benchmarks above are your context, but no benchmark prices your specific unit, and the decision runs on different inputs: your carrying cost against your rent, and your holding period. That arithmetic is specific enough that no general article should attempt it for you.
If you are trying to time it, I would gently suggest that is the wrong problem. Nobody can tell you where the bottom is. What you can control is not buying the wrong building, and not pricing your own home off the wrong number.
Where the numbers came from
Everything above is from TRREB’s July 2026 Market Watch, released August 6, 2026. Every year-over-year figure is an MLS Home Price Index benchmark change, which tracks a consistent typical home rather than the average of whatever happened to sell. The sales, inventory and days-on-market figures are July 2026 levels as published.
One limitation worth stating, since it shapes what I can and cannot tell you. TRREB publishes year-over-year comparisons at the municipal level only for the Home Price Index. There is no published municipal year-ago figure for sales or average price, so I have not quoted one. Where I have used sales comparisons, they are for the City of Toronto and the 905 as regions, and I have said so at each point.
If you would like me to walk through what any of this means for a specific building or a specific street, that is a conversation I am always glad to have.