I received a phone call the other day, and it did not go well.

Sometimes, you can just tell from the tone of the other person’s voice.

At first, I thought maybe it was a really nervous telemarketer or something, but it turned out he wanted to talk about real estate.

“I want to, um, talk about, well, I need to see if you can help, um, I have this, um, condo, and I need to sell it…”

I had a feeling that I knew exactly where this was going.

I wouldn’t blame a person for being a tiny bit nervous if they wanted to sell their condo in today’s market.  It’s certainly not a seller’s market, condos are taking a lot longer to sell, and prices are down.

But this nervous?

This wasn’t about a typical, run-of-the-mill resale condo.

I knew exactly what this was about.

“What’s the condo you’re looking to sell?” I asked the young man.

“Well, I don’t want to sell it,” the young man responded.  “I want to assign it.”

I knew that’s where this was headed.  I could just tell from the tone in his voice.

For those of you who don’t know, an “assignment” is when you essentially sell your agreement of purchase and sale for a pre-construction condo.  When the market was going up, this was easy to do.  But when the market turned, this became quite difficult.

Today, it’s borderline impossible.

“Nobody is buying assignments,” I told him.

“Plus, I’ve never sold an assignment in twenty-two years,” I explained.  “I’ve never sold a pre-construction condo, for exactly the reason why you’re calling me today,” I told him.

He said, “Do you know if, like, anybody is buying?”

I asked him, “What do you have?”

I won’t say which project, but he has a 2-bedroom, 2-bathroom, measuring 650 square feet, for which he paid $710,000.

Oh yeah, and it’s in Durham.

That’s almost $1,100 per square foot for a pre-construction condo in Durham.

Likely a bad floor plan (how do you comfortably fit two bedrooms and two bathrooms into 650 square feet?) and without a parking space, since this building apparently has a 7-to-1 ratio of units to parking spaces.

“I have $142,000 in deposits into this,” he said, referencing his twenty percent.

I asked him what he was looking to sell the assignment for, and he said, “I mean, I’d like to have something left over.”

Is that the best case for pre-construction buyers who have been hung out to dry in this market?  To get “something left over?”

I asked him if he knew what prevailing resale in the area was selling for, and to his credit, he had done his research.  Unfortunately, however, he said, “Around $700 per square foot.”

That would value his 650 square foot condo at around $455,000.  Sure, maybe there’s a premium for the fact that it’s new, but how much of a premium?

I told him, point-blank, “I don’t sell assignments, and I can’t help you, but you need to be realistic here.  If you could unload that for $500,000, you’d be lucky.”

He gasped.

He said, “Then I would still owe the developer like seventy grand.”

I concurred.

He said, “I don’t have it, man.  I don’t have a fucking penny to my name.”

Are there any bankruptcy lawyers or insolvency trustees reading this today?

Any advice?

As we move into the second quarter of 2026, the “condo market” remains quite weak.  But when you break the overall condo market into resale condos and pre-construction condos (and assignments), the contrast is stark.

There’s no market for assignments right now, unless you’re willing to sell for pennies on the dollar, and the only buyers deep-pocketed trusts and institutions who see long-term value.  We know that condo developers aren’t building either, let alone pre-selling, and despite the recent policy announcements about HST rebates, I don’t see this changing.

So that brings us to the resale condo market here in the GTA, and our quarterly look at how the 416 and 905 are performing.

Let’s start with listings, and the following chart shows that 416 listings have plummeted since last year:

For those without an abacus handy, we saw 9,211 new listings in Q1 of 2025, versus only 7,552 in Q1 in 2026.

That’s an 18% decline, year-over-year.

As the five-year chart shows, listings are trending the middle-ground so far this year:

Listings are down in the 905 as well.

We saw 4,948 new listings in Q1 of 2025 versus 4,166 in Q1 of 2026.

That’s a decline of 15.8%.

While 15.8% might not sound like a significant change of pace from last year, it’s enough to maybe, just maybe, change the dynamics in the condo market right now.

Inventory is simply way too high to keep prices from continuing to decline.

Look at the listings from 2025 in the following chart:

It’s not just higher than the previous three years, it’s way higher.

We can see that inventory began to decline in the fall market, both on an absolute and relative basis; relative to the previous three years.  However, that’s because so many frustrated sellers took their properties off the resale market and put them up for lease.

Now, when we move on to sales, we’ll get a much better picture of the market.

Consider this:

If inventory declines but sales remain the same, then the absorption rate skyrockets.

If the absorption rate increases, then prices would likely cease to decline.

So did sales remain the same in Q1?

Absolutely not…

There were 2,504 sales in Q1 of 2025, compared to 2,252 sales in Q1 of 2026.

That’s a 10.1% decline.

If you look hard enough, maybe you spot the beginning of a trend in March.

Sales were down 24.0% year-over-year in January and 11.7% in February; however, sales were up by 2.6% in March.

Like I said: you really have to want to see a trend to believe this has any significance, but it’s something worth monitoring as we move into Q2.

The chart above shows that the trajectory of sales in 2026 is more like that of 2023, and less like what we saw in 2025.

Over in the 905, we saw a 30.4% decline in sales in January, a 10.1% decline in sales in February, and a 1.3% decline in sales in March:

Overall, that’s 1,286 sales in Q1 of 2025 versus 1,114 sales in Q1 of 2026.

That’s a 13.4% decline.

Larger than the 416, but not by much.  These areas continue to move in tandem.

The chart looks very much like that of the 416:

Now, there’s perhaps no greater indicator of price trajectory than the absorption rate.

In 2025, we saw the lowest absorption rate in any single month in the 416, quite possibly ever.  Certainly, for as long as I’ve been tracking this data.

The 24.2% absorption rate from May of 2025 was shocking.

However, that figure was trumped this past January:

A mere 23.5% in January!

However, while the absorption rate was lower in January of 2026 than January of 2025, both February and March saw higher absorption rates than last year.

In fact, the spread continued to widen, with February’s absorption rate up 1.7% over last year, and March up 6.8%.

The chart shows that we’re well ahead of last year’s pace:

Well ahead of last year.  But still well behind 2024, and miles behind 2022 and 2023.

When we look at the 905, something jumps out at us.

I probably don’t have to spell it out for you…

21.9%.

Where’s my crying/laughing emoji?

I’ve never seen anything like this before.  That’s just a wild, wild figure!

In any event, the absorption rate in the 905 increased year-over-year in both February and March, like it did in the 416, but still remains incredibly low.

Now, how does this translate for prices?

Not well, of course.

And even though the absorption rate is up slightly in the 416 so far this year, the average condo price is way, way down…

Just to finish this thought, we’ll take a look at the 905 as well:

2025 was a much harder year for 905 condos, as you can see from the chart.

I don’t know how much we can glean from three months so far in 2026, but suffice it to say, all the folks that wanted to sell in 2025 and then said, “I think it’ll rent it out, keep it one more year, and sell in 2026” are going to have a hard time reconciling what’s happened in the market.

Next week, we’ll look at your second-favourite topic: rental market statistics!