If you spent August somewhere quiet and came back to headlines about supply tightening and prices about to turn, the fear arrives in one sentence: the window closed while you were away. It did not. But something did change, and it changes how you should write an offer this fall.
The short version
Fewer listings do not mean you should suddenly bid harder. For most condo buyers in the GTA this fall, the change most likely to reach you is fewer good units in your budget to choose from, rather than a sharp jump in what they cost. Prices in August were still below a year ago, and on the board’s seasonally adjusted month-to-month view they were essentially flat, which is not a market that has clearly turned either way.
Where that leaves you depends on your segment. In softer ones, such as condo apartments in Richmond Hill, you still have room to negotiate and no reason to give up your protections. In firmer ones, such as condo apartments in the City of Toronto, where sales held while listings across the region thinned, waiting is more likely to cost you the unit you wanted than to save you money, and the only way to know is to count the competing units in the building you want. And a rate hold at the Bank of Canada is not a cheaper mortgage: the yields that price fixed rates have been moving up, not down.
If you wait this fall, you are more likely to lose the home you wanted than to save money on it.
What I would do before writing an offer
Price from what sold, not from what is asked. An asking price is a decision somebody made about their own home. What comparable units in comparable buildings actually closed at is evidence, and in a month like August the two can be far apart. If a seller’s number is anchored to last spring, this is when I would tell you not to improve your offer until the recent sales support it.
Count the competing inventory in that building and segment, not in the region. If there are three comparable units for sale in the same building, the regional tightening story has nothing to do with your offer. If there is one unit like it in the whole neighbourhood and it is well kept, that is when I would say be ready to move.
Keep your conditions unless the actual competition takes them away. In a segment with the depth Richmond Hill showed in August, there is no reason to hand away your financing condition, your inspection, or on a condo the status certificate review your lawyer does. A deeper shelf is exactly the room those protections need. In a firmer segment, that is a conversation to have unit by unit, never a rule you carry into every offer.
Read the listing’s history, not just its photos. Days on market, and whether a unit has been listed and relisted, tell you how firm to be; a photo cannot show you either. The things I check with Richmond Hill clients before they sign anything are set out here, and the step-by-step Ontario buying process lays out where each protection sits.
On a condo, buy the building, not just the unit. You are buying into a corporation’s finances as well as a home, and that is the risk no market cycle removes. What a well-run building looks like is its own guide.
Get your pre-approval renewed before you shop, not after you find the unit. How long its rate hold lasts is a question for your lender or mortgage broker, and this fall it is worth more than any headline about the Bank.
Why I believe that: what August actually showed
Three facts from the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB) for August 2026, and they belong together.
Sales across the GTA were 5,057, down 2.1 per cent from August 2025. That is close to flat. New listings were 12,075, down 14.1 per cent, and the homes still available at month end numbered 24,482, down 11.3 per cent. So fewer homes arrived, and fewer were left standing, while roughly as many sold. That is what tightening means, and the headlines got that part right.
Here is the part they left out. Prices remained below a year ago: the average selling price was $993,410, down 2.7 per cent, and the MLS Home Price Index composite benchmark, which tracks a consistent typical home rather than whatever happened to sell, was $925,900, down 4.46 per cent. On the board’s seasonally adjusted month-over-month view, the average edged up from July, the benchmark was essentially flat, and new listings were actually up from July. Flat for a month is not the same thing as turned, and nobody publishing today can tell you what it becomes over the winter.
One limit on all of this: the report tells us how many homes came to market, not why. The reasons belong to thousands of households I have never met.
Where it is softer, and where it is firmer
Take my own home base, in the segment most of my first-time buyers are shopping in.
| Segment, August 2026 | Sales | New listings | Available at month end | Sales-to-new-listings ratio | Months of inventory |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GTA, all home types | 5,057 | 12,075 | 24,482 | 37.5% | 4.6 |
| Richmond Hill, all home types | 161 | 449 | 933 | 33.1% | 5.6 |
| Richmond Hill, condo apartments | 33 | 94 | 197 | not published | not published |
| York Region, condo apartments | 170 | 507 | 1,098 | not published | not published |
In August, 33 condo apartments sold in Richmond Hill, at an average of 95 per cent of their asking price after an average of 47 days on the market, and 197 were still available at the end of the month. A shelf like that reads like room to negotiate. The regional number is true. It is not a description of this segment.
The City of Toronto condo apartment segment behaved differently. Sales there were 885, essentially flat at down 0.2 per cent from a year earlier, while condo apartment sales across the rest of the GTA fell 6.9 per cent; average prices were down 2.1 per cent in the city and down 7.6 per cent outside it. When sales hold steady in a segment while listings thin, the usual pattern is that choice narrows before price moves, and price may not move at all. The monthly report does not tell me how much the city’s condo selection narrowed in August, only that sales there held while listings across the region fell. That is the segment where I would check the competing inventory in your building before assuming you have time, rather than reading the regional numbers as permission to wait.
The other piece of the picture is the year-over-year benchmark, the one municipal comparison TRREB publishes. The Richmond Hill apartment benchmark was $485,900 in August, down 14.24 per cent from a year earlier, against $513,000 and down 9.69 per cent for York Region and $547,400 and down 6.88 per cent for the City of Toronto. Why the York Region and Richmond Hill apartment benchmarks fell more than the city’s is last month’s piece.
And on money: the Bank of Canada held its policy rate at 2.25 per cent on September 2, and in the same release noted that financial conditions have tightened since July and that long-term bond yields have moved up, including in Canada. A hold is not a cut, and a policy rate hold is not a mortgage rate hold, because fixed rates are priced off those yields.
Two things worth knowing about the numbers you will see quoted
The two ratios everyone quotes, the sales-to-new-listings ratio and months of inventory, are calculated by TRREB as twelve-month moving averages. That is the board’s own definition in the notes at the back of the report. They describe the past year’s trend, not the month you are shopping in, and in this report they are published only for all home types at the municipal level, never for condo apartments alone. So when someone hands you a condo ratio for your town, ask where it came from.
And in this report TRREB publishes a municipal year-over-year comparison only for the MLS Home Price Index benchmark. Anyone telling you that “sales in Richmond Hill fell X per cent” this month is working from something other than the board’s report, because that column does not exist in it.
Where the numbers came from
Every GTA and municipal figure above is from TRREB’s Market Watch for August 2026, released September 3, 2026, quoted as printed and never recalculated, and checked against the source PDF before it went into this piece. The interest rate figures and the note on bond yields are from the Bank of Canada’s September 2, 2026 announcement. The condo apartment comparisons between the City of Toronto and the rest of the GTA are regional, never municipal, and every municipal year-ago figure here is a benchmark change.
If you would like a read on the segment you are actually shopping in, ask me. That is a conversation I am always glad to have.