“We’ll wait until prices come down” is a forecast dressed up as a plan. The honest answer to it uses the actual market data for the month your buyer is asking, not a guess in either direction.
Key takeaways
Treat “we’re waiting for prices to drop” as a real question with a real, dated answer, not a mood to talk a buyer out of. The most useful thing you can do with it is show them exactly what the market did last month, using CREA’s own published numbers, rather than reassuring or alarming them with an opinion.
CREA’s national statistics release for July 2026 shows a market that has been cooling for a year, but is not simply continuing to fall in a straight line. National home sales edged up 0.5% month-over-month. The non-seasonally adjusted national average price was $674,819, up 0.2% from July 2025. And the National Composite MLS® HPI — the benchmark measure built to track a market’s trend rather than any single month’s average — edged up 0.1% from June to July, “the first increase in the national measure since November 2024,” even as it remained down 3.3% compared to a year earlier. CREA Chair Garry Bhaura framed it this way in the same release: “the ongoing shift towards a more normal balance between supply and demand in so many markets across Canada is good news for buyers, whether that means not having to worry about your new home falling in value, or not feeling pressured to make a decision due to competing offers.” A buyer waiting specifically for the year-over-year decline to continue is betting against a trend that had just turned, as of the most recent month on record.
Price alone is a lagging, noisy signal. CREA’s two balance measures move first and say more about where negotiating leverage actually sits. The national sales-to-new-listings ratio — sales divided by new listings — was 51.3% in July, “converging on the long-term average” of 54.7%, and CREA states that “readings roughly between 45% and 65% are generally consistent with balanced housing market conditions.” Months of inventory told the same story: 4.7 months nationally, just below the long-term average of 5, with CREA’s own bands putting a seller’s market below 3.6 months and a buyer’s market above 6.4 months. Nationally, July 2026 does not clear CREA’s own bar for a buyer’s market on either measure — though CREA notes Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador were still borderline sellers’ markets, and Ontario’s own months-of-inventory reading, while normalizing, had spent the first four months of 2026 in buyer’s-market territory. The honest version of this conversation uses your own board’s current reading of both measures, not the national blend, and not last year’s headlines.
Everything above is a national blend, and CREA is explicit elsewhere that a national or even provincial figure is not a reliable stand-in for a specific market — the same caution behind the MLS® Home Price Index, which CREA built specifically because “average or median prices can change a lot from one month to the next and paint an inaccurate or even unhelpful picture of price values and trends” at anything less than the benchmark level. CREA’s own housing market stats hub lets you select a specific board’s current release rather than relying on the national numbers above. Before you have this conversation with a buyer, pull your own board’s current sales-to-new-listings ratio and months of inventory and use those, not the national release quoted here — this article’s numbers are a template for the conversation, not a substitute for your own market’s current reading.
Be direct about the limits of the data too. No Canadian source — not CREA, not any board — publishes a sale-to-list price ratio, so there is no single published figure that tells a buyer exactly how much room exists between asking price and what a seller will actually accept in the current market. Anyone quoting a specific percentage as a national or provincial constant is not citing a real source. What you can give a buyer instead is the mechanism: a lower sales-to-new-listings ratio and a higher months-of-inventory reading both point toward more room to negotiate, a tighter reading toward less — direction and magnitude from real, current numbers, not a manufactured percentage.
A buyer weighing “wait for a lower price” against “buy now” is really weighing several moving parts at once, and price is only one of them. Rent paid while waiting does not come back. Mortgage rates can move in either direction over a waiting period, changing the carrying cost on whatever price the buyer eventually pays. The Bank of Canada’s own rate decisions are the place to check first, not a guess: its September 2026 announcement held the target for the overnight rate at 2.25%, with the Bank Rate at 2.5% — a real, dated number a buyer can check against the rate on their own pre-approval, rather than assuming rates will simply keep falling because prices might. The Bank itself frames the current setting as a hold, not a signal of where it goes next — which is exactly why a buyer should be checking the live number before making a waiting decision, not working from whatever rate was quoted to them last spring. And a buyer’s own qualification — income, debt load, credit — is not guaranteed to stay constant either, for better or worse. None of this argues a buyer should never wait; it argues that “prices might drop further” is one variable in a decision that has several, and it deserves to be sized against the others with real numbers rather than settled on its own.
Nationally, no — CREA’s own July 2026 figures for the sales-to-new-listings ratio and months of inventory both sat inside its balanced-market bands, not its buyer’s-market threshold. Conditions vary by province and by board, so check your own market’s current reading rather than applying the national figure.
No — that is a forecast, not a fact, and CREA’s own July 2026 release recorded the first month-over-month HPI increase since November 2024. Show the buyer the current data and the trend, and let them weigh it themselves rather than presenting either direction as certain.
There isn’t one — no Canadian source publishes a sale-to-list ratio. Use the sales-to-new-listings ratio and months of inventory for your buyer’s specific board to describe the direction and rough scale of negotiating room instead of quoting an invented percentage.
Related: once a buyer decides to move ahead, working backwards from an income target covers the agent-side planning math, what happens if rates move before closing covers what changes between an accepted offer and the closing date, and for a buyer weighing self-employed income against a purchase timeline, see buyers who are self-employed.
A short call is enough to walk through what your own board's current numbers actually say.
