There is a real gap between what people search for — a province-by-province table — and what CREA actually publishes for free. This page is honest about that gap and fills it with what boards do publish.
Headline figure
51.3%
Canada's national sales-to-new-listings ratio in July 2026, tightening from June and converging toward the long-term national average of 54.7%. CREA treats a reading between roughly 45% and 65% as a balanced market.
What the data says
“Sales-to-new-listings ratio” (SNLR) and “sales-to-active-listings ratio” measure different things and are not interchangeable. SNLR compares a month's sales against that same month's new listings — it tells you how fast fresh inventory is being absorbed. Sales-to-active compares sales against the total pool of listings currently sitting on the market — it tells you how deep that pool is relative to demand. CREA's national commentary uses SNLR; the Fraser Valley board, following BCREA convention, uses sales-to-active. Both are legitimate, and both get called “the ratio” in conversation, which is exactly how a Fraser Valley figure ends up wrongly compared against a CREA national one.
If a client or a headline quotes a ratio, the first question worth asking is which of the two it is measuring, because a market can look tight on one and loose on the other depending on how much active inventory is sitting unsold.
For most of Canada, a clean numeric provincial SNLR simply is not published anywhere CREA makes freely available — the national release is qualitative about regions rather than tabular. Where a local board does publish its own ratio, as Fraser Valley does, it is worth citing directly and labelling which ratio it is. Where a board publishes months of inventory instead, as Mississauga's board-level statistics do, that is a legitimate substitute tightness signal even though it is not literally “sales-to-new-listings”.
The honest summary: Canada as a whole sat at a roughly balanced 51.3% SNLR in July 2026, with Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador still leaning toward sellers, most other provinces converging toward long-run norms, the Fraser Valley specifically in buyer's-market territory on its own ratio, and Mississauga split by property type from tight (semi-detached, 2.4 months) to loose (condo apartments, 6.3 months). That is a real, sourced picture — it is just not one uniform table.
Quote the national figure as the national figure, name the two provincial exceptions CREA itself calls out, and go to the local board for anything more granular than that. See national home sales and price, tracked for the sales and price side of the same national picture, and days on market, compared across Canada for how these same two boards read on time-to-sell rather than inventory depth.
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