New Westminster Real Estate: Greater Vancouver's Lowest Benchmark, Down 8.2% in a Year (October 2026)

New Westminster has the lowest composite benchmark price of any area Greater Vancouver REALTORS® tracks: $719,600 in September 2026. It's also tied for the biggest drop, down 8.2% in a year against 5.5% for Greater Vancouver as a whole.

Both facts come from the same place. New West is a condo city, and condos are the part of the market that has fallen hardest. Below are GVR's New Westminster numbers by property type, 13 months of trend, sales, rents from CMHC, and what's for sale today on EstateBlock in Uptown, Downtown, the Quay, Sapperton and Queensborough. Then what I'd do with it.

Source: Greater Vancouver REALTORS®, September 2026 stats package, MLS® Home Price Index, New Westminster.

New Westminster prices by property type

GVR reports New Westminster as one area. The benchmark is the MLS® Home Price Index: the estimated price of a typical home with a fixed set of features. It moves more smoothly than a median, which in a city this size can swing with a handful of sales.

Source: Greater Vancouver REALTORS®, September 2026 stats package, MLS® Home Price Index table, New Westminster rows.

Detached houses had the worst year: −10.4%, and −7.7% in the last six months alone. A typical New West house is now $1,356,900. Apartments are down 7.5% to $579,900. Townhouses fell least, −6.8%, and are still 8.2% above September 2021.

The longer columns are the ones I'd show an owner thinking about selling. Over three years, everything is down: the composite 13.5%. Over ten years, the composite is still up 32.6%, apartments 55.9%. Anyone who bought in New West before 2016 is still well ahead. Anyone who bought in 2022 or 2023 probably isn't.

New West vs the rest of Greater Vancouver

On condos alone, New West isn't the cheapest. Sunshine Coast ($461,000), Maple Ridge ($513,400), Port Coquitlam ($550,000), Tsawwassen ($556,000), Pitt Meadows ($558,200) have a lower apartment benchmark. The composite is lowest because of the mix: it blends the three property types, and New West's market is mostly apartments (484 of 695 sales so far this year), so the blend leans cheap. Compared with next door, a typical New West condo costs $143,100 less than one in Burnaby South and $54,900 less than in Vancouver East.

New West's −8.2% is tied with Port Coquitlam for the steepest one-year decline of any GVR area. GVR's chief economist Andrew Lis said in the September release that the weakness is contained to the sizeable apartment segment. For a city where most homes are apartments, that's the whole story.

Thirteen months of New Westminster prices

The composite benchmark has gone down in 11 of the last 12 months, from $788,100 in September 2025 to $719,600. The only up month was March. There was no spring rebound to speak of.

Indexed to September 2025, detached houses took the biggest fall: $1,521,900 to $1,356,900, with most of the drop from April on. Apartments fell faster early, from $625,000 to $585,200 by February, then moved between $576,100 and $595,600. Townhouses dropped through the winter, from $921,800 to $876,600 in January, held between $868,500 and $892,700 until August, then slipped 2.2% in September. These are first-published figures; GVR revises earlier months slightly.

Sales: houses up, condos down

From January to September, 695 New Westminster homes sold on the MLS®, 8.3% fewer than in the same months of 2025. But the split is the interesting part. Detached sales are up 37% (136 vs 99). Apartment sales are down 13% (484 vs 557), and townhouse sales are down 26%.

My read: lower house prices are bringing out buyers who live here, while investors who used to buy New West condos are mostly sitting out. GVR said much the same about the whole region in its September release: end-users are primarily driving the market, as investor-driven demand awaits more favourable market conditions.

Source: Greater Vancouver REALTORS® monthly stats packages, September 2025 to September 2026 (New Westminster figures as first published each month): Listing & Sales Activity Summary and MLS® Sales Facts. Sales ÷ new listings calculated by EstateBlock. GVR doesn't publish active listings by area, so this is not the sales-to-active ratio.

In every month but December, New West condo sellers listed 2.3 to 4.7 units for every one that sold. September's median apartment sale was $537,500, the lowest of the 13 months, down from $617,444 a year earlier. Medians move with the mix of what sold, so I wouldn't read that as a 13% price drop; the benchmark (−7.5%) is the better guide. But it does tell you where the deals are closing.

Houses are the opposite problem: too few sales to say much month to month. GVR doesn't print a New West detached median in most months because there were fewer than 20 sales. In September there were 9.

Rents and vacancy

New West has nearly as many purpose-built rentals as Burnaby: CMHC counted 10,622 rental apartment and row units in October 2025, close to Burnaby's 11,771. Here's how its rents compare.

Source: CMHC Rental Market Survey, October 2025, Housing Market Information Portal, tables 2.1.1.4 and 2.1.11.4 (row and apartment, by census subdivision). New Westminster's and Burnaby's vacancy rates carry CMHC quality grades of "use with caution" (d) and "good" (c). Average rents include long-time tenants and are lower than asking rents for a vacant unit.

A 5.8% vacancy rate is high for this region; the City of Vancouver was at 2.7%. CMHC flags New West's number as one to use with caution, but it points the same way as everything else here: more purpose-built rental supply than demand.

For an investor, that matters. CMHC's average two-bedroom rent in New West was $2,134 a month, and that's an average of what existing tenants pay, not what a new lease gets. Put that next to a $579,900 benchmark condo plus strata fees and today's mortgage rates, and I'd expect most purchases not to carry themselves; run your own numbers. That's my read of why apartment sales are down 13%. For regional rent trends, see my Vancouver rental market post.

What's for sale in New Westminster, by neighbourhood

This is EstateBlock's New Westminster page on October 22, 2026: 588 homes for sale, a median asking price of $699,000 and 45 new listings in the past week. These are asking prices on active listings, not sale prices.

Source: EstateBlock.com New Westminster live listing pages, snapshot taken October 22, 2026 (active listings, asking prices).

184 listings, 31% of what's for sale, have already had a price cut, averaging 6.7%. That share is higher than the 20% to 27% range in Burnaby, Coquitlam, Port Moody, Port Coquitlam, Richmond, Vancouver on the same day.

Rough supply math, mixing two sources: dividing today's EstateBlock listings by GVR's average monthly sales from July to September gives about 6 months of condo supply, 7 months for townhouses and 11 months for houses. Treat those as ballpark figures, not an official ratio. Turned into GVR's terms, that's a sales-to-active ratio of roughly 17% for condos, 15% for townhouses and 9% for houses. GVR says prices tend to face downward pressure when the ratio dips below 12 per cent for a sustained period. By that rough measure, houses are the soft segment on inventory, while condos and townhouses look balanced on stock even as their prices keep slipping. My read: condo prices are being held down by the flow of new listings and the lack of investors, more than by a pile of unsold units.

Source: EstateBlock.com New Westminster live listing pages, snapshot taken October 22, 2026 (active listings, asking prices) (neighbourhood pages). Moody Park had 9 listings and is left out. Share with a price cut = listings with a cut ÷ homes for sale.

Uptown is the bargain end: 93 condos at a median ask of $499,000, or $546 a square foot. It also has the highest share of price cuts of the three largest neighbourhoods (35%). The Quay, along the river near New Westminster Station, asks the most per square foot ($767), followed by Sapperton ($727) near Sapperton Station and Royal Columbian, and Downtown ($697).

Queensborough, on Lulu Island across the Fraser, is a different market from the rest of the city: 35 houses at a median ask of $1,299,000 and 35 townhouses at $879,000. It's where most of New West's townhouse listings are. Houses there have been listed a median 92 days.

What I'd do with this

None of this is a forecast. For the named forecasts, see my 2027 predictions post. For the regional numbers, see the Greater Vancouver market update, and for the city next door, Burnaby real estate.