“A little stuck”: A weak apartment market means a difficult choice for potential relocation buyers
go through Sammy Hudes
Cities such as Toronto and Vancouver have opened up and plunged investor demand in recent years, and apartment sales have declined, if not stagnant.
For some areas, this marks a difference from the overall real estate picture. In the months after the first half of 2025, many industry viewers now predict turnover in the housing market, which is plagued by economic uncertainty related to tariffs and job losses.
Those who want to abandon apartment living and upgrade to homes in tough places: sell now at lower than expected value, or wait for a storm.
“They are a little bothering,” said Victor Tran, a mortgage and real estate expert at Rates.ca.
“They want to appreciate the apartment in the next few years so they can take the money out and use it as a down payment to upgrade to a larger home. However, that money no longer exists.”
Since 2022, apartment sales in the Greater Toronto area have dropped 75% and 37% in the Vancouver area.
The National Housing Administration said the apartment market is expected to remain weak as the completion “stays at record levels and demand remains soft.” “It added that there is little evidence that the price drop will quickly reverse “below the national and global economic outlooks.”
“In some cases, sellers have just decided to press the sell button and lose money on their apartment and then move on,” said Adil Dinani, Vancouver-based real estate agent at Royal Lepage West Real Estate Services.
“There is a lack of liquidity in the apartment market, so it can prevent potential relocation buyers from redistributing that money, or buyers may move in the market because their apartment is not worth the value they expect them to be.”
A report released by the Toronto Regional Real Estate Commission in May showed that apartment condo sales in the Greater Toronto area fell 21.7% in the first quarter of this year, compared with 25.2% new listing sales in the quarter in the first three months of 2024.
Apartment sales fell 2.5% year-on-year last month, roughly in line with the overall home sales trend in the region. However, this is after the 25.1% drop in activity in the apartment market, which far exceeds the decline in sales for other housing types.
That month, detached home sales fell 10.6%, and township displacement fell 9.8%, and semi-detached homes were below 0.3% from May 2024.
Toronto-area real estate agent VY NGO described the apartment market as “brutal” even as the activity has begun to stabilize on other properties.
“I have multiple apartment listings now that it’s hard to sell,” said the sales representative of Big City Realty Inc. NGO.
“It may trend towards next year for the rest of the year. It will take some time until it recovers.”
In larger Vancouver, sales of apartments last month were 1,040, down 16.5% from June 2024. Compared with independent house sales, the year-on-year decline was higher, down 5.3% from June 2024, while the sales of affiliated houses increased by 3.7%.
For now, Dinani said the market price of successful apartment sales ultimately depends on “who is the most motivated seller near you.”
“Some sellers are open-minded and are in a position to sell, they are committed to selling, and there are still buyers who buy these properties,” he said.
“But if you’re in a position where you’re at a certain price or a certain expectation and a position that the market doesn’t support, we just encourage sellers to step on the brakes and find alternatives. So they stay in the family for a long time, if their financial situation allows them to do so, then rent it and then look at it.”
Tran believes that people looking to upgrade to larger homes call it “terrible time” for people who want to upgrade to larger homes, for example, finding buyers may take much longer than they hope.
Although he said it is safer to sell first and then make a quote on a new property, it also has the risk of not moving the property in time.
“A lot of people are thinking, like, ‘Well, when are we going to hit the lowest point, when are we going to see some recovery and confidence back to the market, when will we start to see things turn around?’ No one knows,” Tran said.
“I personally don’t think this will happen soon.”
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Last modified: July 10, 2025
