Presale Condos in Vancouver: 2 Launches in August, 4,376 Unsold Units and the Projects in Court (2026)

In August 2026, developers launched 2 presale projects across all of Greater Vancouver and the Fraser Valley: 76 homes in total, with about 3% of them sold early, according to MLA Canada. For a market that used to release more than a thousand presale homes in a single month, that's close to a standstill.

Meanwhile the finished-but-unsold pile keeps growing, several projects that took presale deposits are in court, and buyers who signed in 2022 or 2023 are closing into a resale market where the typical apartment is worth about 11% less than three years ago. Here's the data on Vancouver presale condos as of mid-October 2026, the projects in trouble, and what actually protects your deposit.

If you want the step-by-step buying process and contract checklist, that's in my guide to buying a presale condo in BC. This post is the market side.

Sources: MLA Canada, The Pulse, September 2026; CMHC via Castanet, June 2026; Steve Saretsky, February 2026; GVR September 2026 stats package.

The launch drought

July is a fair month to compare because it's mid-summer every year. In July 2021, 1,426 presale homes came to market. In July 2026 it was 42, all of them townhomes. Those three July projects did sell well, about half the units in the first month. That's the one corner of the presale market still working: ground-oriented homes for people who plan to live in them.

Sources: MLA Canada, The Pulse (June, July, August, September 2026 editions); 2025 totals via Spark, January 2026. MLA's October edition, covering September, wasn't out when this was published.

Why so few launches? Lenders usually want a big share of a building presold before they fund construction (Maskeen's Victory project in Surrey, for example, faced a $50 million presale threshold), and buyers aren't signing at the prices developers need. The investor buyer is mostly gone. At Rennie, investors were about 50% of presale buyers from 2020 to 2023, 25% in 2024 and 7% in early 2025.

CMHC's Fall 2026 supply report, as reported in the Delta Optimist, says condo starts in Metro Vancouver fell another 40% in the first half of 2026. Fewer starts now means fewer new condos finishing a few years from now. My read: that's the setup for a tighter condo market down the road, but nobody can tell you when.

Finished and still unsold

4,376 finished condos with no buyer in May 2026, up from 2,488 a year earlier and 1,262 two years earlier. Rennie and Zonda, counting a wider area, had 2,179 at the end of 2024, 3,472 at the end of 2025 and 3,945 by the end of March 2026. Rennie had forecast 3,650 by the end of 2026 for Metro Vancouver; its broader-area count with Zonda was already 3,945 at the end of March.

Sources: CCPA tally of CMHC data, July 2026; EstateBlock.com live listings, snapshot taken October 14, 2026 (active resale listings, asking prices).

This is where the presale market and the resale market meet. In Burnaby and Richmond, unsold new units sit next to hundreds of resale condos, and Richmond's resale condos have the longest median listing time of any city EstateBlock tracks (71 days). In Coquitlam, Tri-Cities Dispatch, citing CMHC data, reported 814 built-but-empty condos in August 2026.

Governments have noticed. In June 2026, Ottawa and B.C. announced a partnership aimed at turning more than 2,200 vacant condos into affordable homes through Build Canada Homes and BC Housing. Some builders have also moved to bulk sales and incentives, which I covered in the Vancouver condo market breakdown.

Presale projects in court or cancelled

These are the Greater Vancouver projects I could confirm from court filings, receiver reports or news coverage of them. It isn't a complete list; nobody publishes one. "Deposits" is what the source says happened to presale buyers' money, as of the source date.

Sources linked in each row; status as of each source's date (latest: the Moonlight Sonata monitor's report of September 29, 2026).

Two things jump out. Most of these are in Surrey and Burnaby. And the deposit outcomes vary a lot: returned, held in trust, or already spent on construction under deposit insurance with buyers waiting on a court.

What protects a presale deposit in B.C.

B.C.'s Real Estate Development Marketing Act (REDMA) sets the rules. The ones that have mattered in the cases above:

• Trust. A developer must promptly hand your deposit to a brokerage, lawyer or notary, who holds it in trust in a B.C. account (s.18). It's normally released to the developer only when the building is finished and your purchase is registered, or if you default.
• Deposit insurance. A developer can spend deposits on the project only if it has a deposit protection contract with an insurer, and the disclosure statement must name the insurer (s.19 and Regulation s.10). That's how most Lumina Eclipse deposits were already spent on construction. Check whether your project has one and who the insurer is.
• Seven days to back out. You can rescind in writing within 7 days after the later of signing the contract and acknowledging you received the disclosure statement, and the deposit comes back (s.21). An amendment to the disclosure statement doesn't restart that clock on its own.
• Disclosure. A developer can't market units before filing a disclosure statement, and must file an amendment immediately when material facts change (s.14 to s.16). The Superintendent isn't required to check whether what's in it is accurate (s.17). Lumina Eclipse buyers won because amendments weren't made.
• The 12-month window. Developers can sell before they have a building permit and financing. If they don't get them, buyers can cancel and get the deposit back starting 12 months after the disclosure statement was filed. For projects of 100+ units that join a BCFSA pilot (started Feb 25, 2025), it's 18 months.
• The summary page. Since April 1, 2025, new disclosure statements must start with a "Summary of Pre-sale Risks and Buyer Rights" form that buyers initial.

Moonlight Sonata is the reminder that the trust account is only as good as what went into it. If your project gets into trouble, find out what the receiver or monitor reports as held in trust for your unit. This is general information, not legal advice; confirm your situation with a real estate lawyer.

Sources: Real Estate Development Marketing Act, SBC 2004 c.41 (current to Oct 6, 2026); BCFSA advisory on early marketing and the pre-sale summary form; BCFSA pre-sale summary form.

If you already hold a presale contract

If you signed in 2022 or 2023 for a building finishing now, here's the problem. Greater Vancouver's apartment benchmark is $682,500, down 11.1% from three years ago. Your lender lends against the appraisal at completion, not your contract price, so if the unit appraises below what you agreed to pay, you cover the gap in cash on top of the down payment. One big-bank lender told housing analyst Steve Saretsky that completing presales were appraising 10% to 30% below the purchase price; that's one lender's account, not a statistic. Money.ca, citing the Globe and Mail, reported in September 2026 that developers had filed about two dozen lawsuits against presale buyers across five projects.

Selling the contract (an assignment) is harder than it was: about 90 assignment listings at the end of January 2026, down from 462 in April 2024. And the taxes on an assignment changed in the last few years:

The Province's own example: a $750,000 contract signed in April 2025 and assigned in January 2026 for $800,000 owes $10,000 in B.C. home flipping tax. For more, see my home flipping tax explainer. This is general information, not tax advice; confirm your own situation with an accountant.

Buying a presale now: the math changed

Two tax changes make new homes cheaper for some buyers than resale:

• First-Time Home Buyers' GST rebate: up to $50,000 back, which is all of the GST on a new home up to $1,000,000, phasing out at $1,500,000. It applies to agreements signed from March 20, 2025. If you take over a contract that was originally signed before that date, you don't get it.
• B.C.'s newly built home exemption: no property transfer tax on a new home worth up to $1,100,000, partial up to $1,150,000, if it's your principal residence and you move in within 92 days.

Resale condos don't get either (a first-time buyer of a resale condo can still use B.C.'s smaller first-time buyers' PTT exemption). On the other side of the ledger, a presale still means waiting years for a building that may change, with your deposit tied up. And completed, unsold units are a third option: you can see the actual unit, the GST rebate and newly built PTT exemption can still apply to a new unit bought from the developer if you qualify and nobody has lived in it yet, and there's no completion wait.

Use these resale asking prices as your yardstick. They're asking prices, not sales, but if a presale in Burnaby is priced well above the $879 a square foot that Burnaby resale condos are asking today, you're paying for the wait and the newness. Get the per-square-foot price of resale units in the nearest finished towers before you sign.

My read