Metro Vancouver Real Estate Market: Is Now the Time to Buy?

The Metro Vancouver real estate market is soft right now, and the headlines make it sound worse than the data does. Here's where things sit heading into summer, and how I'd read it if you're weighing a move.

The Metro Vancouver Real Estate Market: May Numbers

Greater Vancouver REALTORS® reported 2,150 residential sales in May. That's down 3.5% from a year ago and about 27% below the 10-year seasonal average. Sales are clearly quiet. The price picture, though, is more mixed than that sales count makes it sound.

The MLS® composite benchmark is sitting at $1,100,700. That's down 6.2% from last May, but up 0.2% from April. So prices have softened over the year while basically flattening out month to month. By property type:

• Detached: $1,847,900, down 6.9% year-over-year, up 0.4% from April

• Townhouse: $1,048,200, down 5.1% year-over-year, up 0.5% from April

• Apartment: $697,800, down 7.9% year-over-year, down 0.7% from April

Inventory is what I'd really pay attention to. There are 16,917 homes listed right now, roughly 35% above the 10-year seasonal norm. New listings actually came in lower than last May (6,115, down 7.6%), so the deep inventory is mostly homes that have been sitting, built up over months. The sales-to-active listings ratio is 13.1% (10.7% for detached, 15.4% attached, 14.2% apartment), which lands us in balanced territory that leans soft. Buyers have room to negotiate, especially on detached homes and condos.

My take

Prices are down on the year, inventory is deep, and that combination gives buyers real bargaining power. But the low sales volume tells me plenty of people on both sides are waiting for a signal that the timing is finally right.

The Best Time to Buy in Vancouver? 64% of Canadians Say It Doesn't Exist.

That waiting is worth picking apart. A recent RBC Home Ownership Poll found 64% of Canadians believe you can never really know when the right time is to buy, and only 27% feel now is that time. But here's the part that stuck with me: among people actually planning to buy within two years, 45% say now is the right time. The closer someone gets to the market, the better today's conditions tend to look. That matches what I'm seeing day to day. The buyers who are genuinely engaged are finding value, while a lot of the folks on the sidelines are mostly reacting to headlines.

Speaking of headlines, you may have seen the national coverage about a near-record number of sellers pulling their homes off the market. It sounds ominous. The actual data (Redfin's U.S. numbers, but the pattern looks similar here) points to pretty ordinary reasons: homes taking longer to sell, more competition, and asking prices still set at pandemic-peak levels. Re-listings are climbing at the same time. A lot of those sellers are just resetting price or strategy and coming back within a few weeks. To me that's a market adjusting, and our high-but-steady inventory and flat monthly prices fit the same read.

Zooming in on the condo markets

Apartments are the segment that's softened most on price this year, so they're worth a closer look. I pulled the daily numbers for the three core condo markets (the City of Vancouver, Richmond, and Burnaby) for roughly the last eight weeks against the same window a year ago.

The takeaway: buyers are still showing up. Sales counts are running essentially flat year-over-year in all three. The City of Vancouver is dead even, Richmond is a hair higher, and Burnaby a hair lower, all within the normal week-to-week noise.

Where they differ is price. City of Vancouver condos still sit clearly at the top, around the $760K mark, and they've mostly been choppy rather than trending. Richmond runs cheaper in the low-$600Ks, though its smaller sales volume makes the price line jumpy week to week. Burnaby is the one I'd watch: it gave back a late-May bump and has drifted down into the low-$600Ks, the clearest softening of the three. If you're a condo buyer with flexibility on location, Burnaby is where you've got the most room to push on price right now.

(A quick note on these figures: they're my counts off daily charts, so read them as close estimates. Weekends and the partial final day are excluded, and small daily samples, Richmond especially, make the price swings look bigger than the real trend.)

Bottom line

If you're buying, this is about as negotiable a market as we've had in years, particularly on detached and condo product, where prices have given back the most. Waiting for a perfect bottom is a tough plan when, as most Canadians will admit, you only spot the bottom well after it's passed.

If you're selling, pricing to today's market instead of 2022's is the whole game. The homes that are priced sensibly and shown well are still selling. The ones chasing last cycle's number are the ones padding that inventory figure.

The right call comes down to your situation. If you want to talk through what this means for your area or your timeline, reach out anytime.

Barton Lui, First-time homebuyer specialist, Realtor

Real Broker

Sources: Greater Vancouver REALTORS® May 2026 market report; RBC Home Ownership Poll (2026); Keeping Current Matters / Redfin re-listings data; daily figures via Zealty.ca.