Vancouver Real Estate Market: What September 2026's Numbers Actually Say

Greater Vancouver sold 1,717 homes in September, 8.4% fewer than a year ago. GVR's own headline put the drop on apartments, and the split by property type shows just how lopsided it was.

Detached sales were up 4.2%. Townhouses and other attached homes were up 0.6%. Apartment sales fell 18.6%, from 954 to 777. That's 177 fewer condo sales in a month when total sales dropped by 158. So the whole decline came from condos, and then some.

That's the problem with talking about "the Vancouver market" as one thing. It isn't. Below are the September 2026 numbers from Greater Vancouver Realtors (GVR) and the Fraser Valley board, the 13-month trend behind them, and what the live listings on EstateBlock show this week, city by city.

The 8.4% drop is a condo story

Apartments made up about 51% of all sales last September. This September it was closer to 45%. GVR's chief economist, Andrew Lis, put it down to end users carrying the market while investors wait for more favourable market conditions.

I read it the same way. The people buying a house or a townhouse to live in are still showing up, in roughly the same numbers as last year. The condo segment leans on investors more than any other, and investors are the buyers with the least reason to hurry right now. Until that changes, I'd expect condos to stay the weakest part of the market. I went through the condo side in detail in a separate post on the Vancouver condo market.

One more thing the type split shows: the board's per-type numbers don't add up exactly to the total (575 + 358 + 777 = 1,710, versus 1,717 reported). That's normal for GVR's reports, so treat the split as the shape of the market, not an exact ledger.

Prices: small cuts that add up

A half-per-cent move in a month doesn't make the news. Thirteen months of them do. The composite benchmark, GVR's price for a typical home across all types, went from $1.14M last September (as first published) to $1.08M now. It went up in only two of those months, March and May, and by less than half a per cent each time.

Detached took the biggest hit in dollars, roughly $140,000 off the benchmark in a year. In percentage terms it's also the steepest, at 7.3%. (The dollar figures are worked out from GVR's year-over-year percentages, so treat them as close, not exact.)

Here's why the slow drift matters if you're selling. The detached benchmark is 3.2% lower than it was in June. If your agent priced your house off June's sales, that's roughly $58,000 on a $1.8 million home. Comparable sales from the spring are already out of date.

Is it a buyer's market?

The quickest test is the sales-to-active ratio: sales in a month divided by active listings (homes for sale). GVR's rule of thumb is that a ratio below 12% for a sustained period puts downward pressure on prices, and above 20% for several months pushes them up. BCREA calls the range in between balanced.

September came in at 10.9% overall: 9.7% for detached homes, 11.4% for apartments and 12.2% for attached homes (mostly townhouses). Put another way, there were about nine homes for sale for every one that sold.

Detached homes have sat under 12% in 12 of the last 13 months (June touched exactly 12.0%). That's the sustained stretch GVR is talking about. Apartments only dipped under 12% in January and now September, so for condos it isn't a trend yet. Attached homes spent most of the year between 12% and 18% and fell to 12.2% in September, their lowest reading since January.

Inventory is the other half. There are 16,394 homes for sale, 24.3% above the 10-year average for September. But that number is down 4.0% from last year, and new listings fell 10.3% from last September, though they were still 5.7% above the 10-year September average. Fewer sellers are coming to market than a year ago. That's why prices are drifting instead of dropping: fewer buyers, but also fewer people forced to sell.

Where prices fell the most

Port Coquitlam and New Westminster are down the most across all types, at 8.2% each, followed by Burnaby North and West Vancouver. The resort and commuter markets held up best: Squamish is essentially flat and Whistler is down less than 1%.

The type-level numbers are where it gets interesting. Some of the biggest single drops are in small markets: Ladner townhouses (−11.2%), Tsawwassen apartments (−12.2%). Fewer sales means a benchmark that swings more, so I wouldn't read too much into one month there. Burnaby South detached (−10.3%) and New Westminster detached (−10.4%) are also double-digit drops. They're thin markets too (New Westminster had 9 detached sales in September), but they fit the 7.3% regional decline in detached prices.

Source: Greater Vancouver Realtors, September 2026 stats package. GVR doesn't publish a West Vancouver townhouse benchmark.

The 10-year view nobody puts in the headline

This is the chart I'd show anyone who still thinks Vancouver real estate only goes up. A typical detached house in West Vancouver is worth about 22% less than it was in September 2016, by GVR's benchmark. On the west side of Vancouver it's down 17%. Richmond detached is up about 3% in a decade.

Meanwhile Maple Ridge detached is up 59%, Squamish 85%, the Sunshine Coast 78%. The money didn't disappear from the region. It moved out along the highways. Apartments tell the same story from the other side: their 10-year gains run from about 10% in West Vancouver to over 90% in Maple Ridge.

What the live listings show this week

The board numbers are a month old by the time they come out. So here is a snapshot of the listings on EstateBlock taken on October 10, 2026: how many homes are for sale in each city, the median asking price, and how many sellers have already cut their price. These are asking prices on active listings, not sale prices, so read them as "what sellers are hoping for" rather than "what homes are worth".

Source: EstateBlock.com live listings, snapshot taken October 10, 2026, Pacific time (active listings, asking prices). All property types. "Price cuts" counts active listings whose asking price has been reduced; "Avg cut" is the average size of those reductions.

Two things jump out. First, the edge suburbs have the most cuts: about 13% of listings in Maple Ridge and Mission, against 7% (about one in fourteen) in Vancouver. It isn't a clean distance pattern, though. New Westminster (10.9%) is higher than Langley or Abbotsford. Second, the cuts aren't small. Across these cities, the average reduction is between roughly 8% and 13%. In Squamish it's 13.3%.

Condo days on market vary a lot by city. The median condo listing in Richmond has been up for 70 days and in Surrey for 64, against 39 in Vancouver and 30 in North Vancouver. You can see every listing behind these numbers on the map: Richmond condos, Surrey condos, Vancouver houses.

Surrey, Langley and the Fraser Valley

Surrey, Langley, North Delta, White Rock, Abbotsford and Mission report to a different board, the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board (FVREB). Its numbers came out on October 5.

FVREB recorded 922 sales in September, down 4.2% from last year, with 9,763 active listings, 31% above its 10-year average. Prices are falling faster here than in GVR's area. The board's chair noted that the detached benchmark is now about $460,000 below its March 2022 peak.

Source: Fraser Valley Real Estate Board, September 2026 stats package.

Central Surrey apartments are down 11.5% in a year and North Delta apartments 11.6%. Mission detached is down 13.3%. If you're a first-time buyer weighing a Burnaby North condo against a Central Surrey townhouse, the gap between them is now under $90,000: $662,400 for the condo benchmark against $749,600 for the townhouse.

Interest rates

The Bank of Canada's policy rate is 2.25%. The Bank has held it at seven straight decisions since its last cut on October 29, 2025, including all six decisions in 2026 so far. The next announcement is October 28, 2026, together with the Monetary Policy Report, and the one after that is December 9.

So rates aren't what's holding this market back in the way they were in 2023. The policy rate is 2.25%, less than half its 5% peak in 2023. What's missing is confidence, and in the condo segment, investors.

What I'd do with this