The safest thing to send when the market turns is not reassurance. It is the dated national figure a client can check for themselves.
Key takeaways
When a market shifts, the safest content is the driest — dated, sourced national figures, not a reassurance that “it's still a great time to buy or sell.” That instinct is not just a tone preference. Any performance or trend claim you attach to a shift, under Canadian competition law, has to be substantiated before you make it, and the substantiation burden sits on you, not on whoever might later question it.
CREA's national release, current as at the date of writing, put the market's own framing plainly: the national average sale price was up 0.2% year-over-year in July 2026, new listings declined 1.6% month-over-month — the third drop in a row — and there were 4.7 months of inventory on a national basis at the end of July 2026, the lowest level so far in 2026 and slightly below the long-term average for the measure of 5 months. The national sales-to-new-listings ratio tightened to 51.3%, converging toward CREA's own long-term average of 54.7%. None of those figures says the market is “hot” or “cold” — they describe a market drifting toward balance from a looser starting point, which is a genuinely different message from either extreme, and a more defensible one to put in front of a client.
The Competition Act's civil-track provision on performance claims puts the obligation on the person making the representation, not the reader questioning it: a representation about a product's performance is reviewable conduct if it is “not based on an adequate and proper test thereof, the proof of which lies on the person making the representation.” “It's still a great time to sell” is a performance claim about the market dressed as reassurance. “Months of inventory nationally sits at 4.7, slightly below the long-term average of 5” is a sourced, dated fact a reader can verify against CREA's own release. The second version is not just more defensible — it is also more useful, because it tells a client something specific rather than something soothing.
The Bank of Canada's own published rate history shows the target for the overnight rate held at 2.25% across every scheduled decision from December 2025 through July 2026 — six consecutive dates at the same level, per the Bank’s own decision table. That is a real, checkable fact. What it does not support, on its own, is a causal claim that the rate hold caused any particular local change in showings or sales — neither the Bank's nor CREA's own published text draws that line explicitly, and drawing it yourself, stated as fact rather than as your own reasonable inference, is the kind of unsubstantiated performance claim the Act's civil-track provision targets.
A market-turn communication that holds up: lead with the one or two national figures that actually changed since your last update, cited to CREA directly rather than paraphrased from a third party; state plainly what you do not know — CREA's own tools do not publish a sale-to-list ratio, and no fabricated substitute belongs in its place; and separate the data from any recommendation, labelling the recommendation as your own professional read rather than folding it into the statistic as if the number itself said it. A client who can tell which sentence is sourced and which is your judgment trusts both more, not less.
Compare two openings for the same client email. Version one: “Great news — the market is turning back in sellers' favour, so now's the time to list.” Version two: “Nationally, the sales-to-new-listings ratio moved to 51.3% in July, up from a looser reading earlier in the year, and CREA treats readings between 45% and 65% as broadly balanced — worth knowing if you've been waiting for a clearer signal.” The second version says less about what to do and more about what actually happened, which is exactly the trade a performance claim requires you to make: you can assert a conclusion and own the burden of proving it, or you can hand the client the sourced figure and let the conclusion follow. The second is both the lower-risk and, for most clients, the more persuasive read, because it does not ask them to simply trust your enthusiasm.
For members using the REALTOR® trademark, there is a professional layer on top of the Competition Act's civil-track test. CREA controls the mark and ties its use to membership standards: “the trademarks REALTOR®, REALTORS® and the REALTOR® logo are controlled by CREA and identify real estate professionals who are members of CREA.” A market-turn message signed with the REALTOR® designation is implicitly trading on that standard, which is one more reason an unsubstantiated “great time to sell” framing is a worse fit for that signature than a sourced, dated figure is.
CREA's interactive price-map and HPI tools load their actual figures dynamically through JavaScript, which means the underlying numbers are not present in a static fetch of the page — a genuine limitation, not a matter of looking harder. Where you cannot source a local figure to a dated release the way the national numbers above are sourced, say so rather than estimating a number that sounds plausible for the neighbourhood. A market-turn message that is honestly national in scope is more defensible than one that quietly guesses at local figures to sound more relevant.
Related: writing a newsletter people open, pricing a home in a falling market, and seller's market versus buyer's market, defined.
Treat it as a performance claim, not a pleasantry — the Competition Act puts the burden of substantiating it on you. A sourced, dated figure a client can verify against CREA's own release is the defensible version of the same message.
Not as a stated fact unless you have a source that draws that causal line — neither the Bank's own rate page nor CREA's release do. You can offer it as your own professional opinion, clearly labelled as such, but not as an established fact.
CREA's own interactive price-map and HPI tools are JavaScript-rendered and cannot be sourced from a static fetch of the page. A local real estate board's own statistics page is usually the more reliable source — verify it carries a dated figure before citing it.
It sets context, not a local prediction — national and local conditions can diverge sharply. Frame a national figure as background for the reader, and pair it with sourced local data where you can find it, rather than letting the national number stand in for a local one.
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