CREA updates the national numbers once a month. Your practice does not run on a monthly clock, and at least one of the numbers that matters most is one nobody publishes for you.
Key takeaways
The most recent national release, dated August 18, 2026, gives the two figures worth anchoring a weekly read to. The sales-to-new-listings ratio tightened to 51.3% in July 2026, converging toward the long-term average of 54.7% — CREA frames readings roughly between 45% and 65% as consistent with a balanced market. Months of inventory sat at 4.7 nationally, “the lowest level so far in 2026” and slightly below the long-term average of 5.0; CREA’s own bands put a seller’s market below 3.6 months and a buyer’s market above 6.4. The same release puts the national average home price at $674,819 for July 2026, up 0.2% year over year, with the MLS® Home Price Index down 3.3% year over year — the smallest annual decline since October 2025. CREA’s next national package is dated for September 15, 2026, which is the real gap a weekly personal dashboard exists to fill.
The value of tracking the sales-to-new-listings ratio and months of inventory weekly is not predicting the market — it is noticing when your local numbers diverge from the national ones CREA reports monthly. A local board reading well outside the 45–65% balanced band, or a local months-of-inventory figure on the opposite side of the national 4.7 from where you would expect, is a signal worth a client conversation before the next monthly release confirms it nationally. Treat the national release as the baseline you check your own read against, not the only number you have.
Two figures that never show up on a market dashboard are just as worth a weekly glance. RECO’s Bulletin 8.1 sets a hard two-year clock on unclaimed trust money — “all unclaimed money held in trust for more than two years must be paid to RECO” — so the honest number to track is how much, if anything, is sitting unresolved and how close it is to that deadline. The second is your trailing four-quarter gross commission against the GST/HST small-supplier threshold: the Excise Tax Act sets registration as mandatory once you cross “$30,000” measured over the four preceding calendar quarters (ETA s.148(1)(b)) — a threshold most productive agents cross within their first active year, which makes it worth checking on a rolling basis rather than discovering after the fact. A third compliance number belongs on the same weekly glance: FINTRAC requires a real estate broker or sales representative to keep a large cash transaction record whenever a client provides $10,000 or more in cash on a single deal, a threshold that also aggregates cash received within 24 hours. The record itself, like every other FINTRAC report, has to be kept for at least five years, which makes it worth tracking on the same rolling basis as the trust and GST/HST numbers rather than only when a large cash deal actually happens.
CASL’s implied-consent windows mean your contact list has a health score, not just a size. Implied consent from a past transaction lasts two years from the purchase, or six months from a bare inquiry (CASL s.10(10)). The share of your list still inside those windows — versus the share that has aged out and needs express consent before another commercial email — is a real number that shifts every week as anniversaries pass, whether or not it is ever reviewed.
The Bank of Canada’s policy rate is worth a weekly glance for a different reason than the CREA figures — it moves on its own eight-fixed-date schedule, not monthly, and a hold is just as much a data point as a change. The rate has sat at 2.25%, unchanged at each of the six announcement dates from December 10, 2025 through July 15, 2026 — a stretch of stability worth knowing when a buyer asks whether to wait for a rate cut. Alongside it, CREA’s own count of “more than 155,000 real estate brokers, agents and salespeople” across “61 real estate boards and associations across Canada” is less a weekly figure than an industry-scale benchmark worth knowing when you talk about competitive intensity — not because it changes week to week, but because most agents have never actually checked it.
Every figure above comes from a regulator, a board, or a federal statute. Your commission rate does not. As one plain statement of the law puts it, real estate commission “is negotiated with your brokerage, recorded in the listing agreement” and “there is no standard rate fixed by law or by any regulator, so the number in your listing agreement is the number.” That means your own effective rate — what you actually collect divided by what you actually close, averaged over a rolling period — is the one figure on this list with no external source to check it against. Tracking it weekly is the only way to catch it drifting before a full quarter has already priced itself on the drift.
An agent’s Friday dashboard for one week in late July 2026 shows six numbers side by side: a local sales-to-new-listings ratio of 58%, comfortably inside CREA’s 45–65% balanced band and close to the national 51.3%; a local months-of-inventory reading of 4.2, near the national 4.7 and well clear of either the 3.6 sellers’-market or 6.4 buyers’-market edge; $4,200 sitting in trust on a closed file, eleven months old, well inside the two-year Bulletin 8.1 window but now flagged for follow-up rather than left untouched; trailing four-quarter gross commission at $27,400, close enough to the $30,000 GST/HST threshold to plan for registration rather than be surprised by it; a CASL list where 12% of contacts crossed the two-year mark since their last transaction that month, moved into a re-permission campaign instead of the regular send; and the Bank of Canada rate confirmed unchanged again at 2.25%, worth a one-line note to buyers asking whether to wait. None of these six numbers appears on the same page anywhere else, and only the first two came from CREA’s monthly release.
Related: a commission cash flow planner, when you have to register for HST, and the gross commission income glossary entry.
Monthly. The August 18, 2026 release itself names the next one, September 15, 2026 — which is the gap a weekly personal dashboard is built to fill between national releases.
CREA frames readings roughly between 45% and 65% as consistent with balanced conditions, with a long-term average of 54.7%. July 2026’s national reading of 51.3% sits inside that band, converging toward the average.
No. No regulator or statute fixes a commission rate anywhere in Canada — it is a private negotiation recorded in the listing agreement, which is exactly why your own effective rate is worth tracking directly rather than compared to a published figure.
A short call can help you see what a weekly dashboard pulling market and compliance data together actually looks like.
