The Canadian Real Estate Association downgraded its forecast Tuesday for home sales in 2025, reporting that the number of homes that changed hands across the country in March was down 9.3 per cent compared with a year ago.
The association said Canadian home sales in March fell 4.8 per cent on a seasonally adjusted basis from February as buyers stayed on the sidelines amid concerns over tariffs and economic uncertainty.
CREA is now expecting 482,673 residential properties to be sold this year, essentially unchanged from 2024 but a steep cut from its previous forecast in January of an 8.6 per cent increase from last year.
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According to CREA, the national average home price is forecast to decrease 0.3 per cent on an annual basis to $687,898 in 2025, about $30,000 lower than predicted in early January.
It marks the largest revision in between its quarterly forecasts since the 2008-2009 financial crisis, the association said.
CREA senior economist Shaun Cathcart said in a news release Tuesday that, in short order, Canada’s housing market has “gone from a slam dunk rebound year to treading water at best.”
“Up until this point, declining home sales have mostly been about tariff uncertainty. Going forward, the Canadian housing space will also have to contend with the actual economic fallout,” said Cathcart.
This forecast follows a report earlier this month from the Ottawa Real Estate Board, showing that the local housing market is gaining momentum, but sales are still behind their pace of a year ago as buyers and sellers remain cautious amid ongoing economic turbulence.
OREB said 1,103 housing units were sold last month, down 6.2 per cent from March 2024. Meanwhile, 2,221 new homes were put on the market, a 4.1 per cent increase from a year ago.
Home sales were 24 per cent below the five-year average and 19.3 per cent below the 10-year average for the month of March, OREB said.
While acknowledging that sales activity was “slightly lower than last year” in March, OREB president Paul Czan said he’s seeing signs that the market is gaining traction as interest rates continue to fall.
“Both buyers and sellers are exercising some caution – likely due to economic uncertainty and the upcoming (federal) election – but the current lower interest rates are encouraging more activity as they step off the sidelines,” Czan said in a news release.
Also in the region, construction on new homes in Ottawa-Gatineau fell 35 per cent in March compared to the previous month, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.
The national housing agency said Tuesday that the region reported 9,330 housing starts last month, compared to 14,252 in February.
The annual pace of mutli-unit urban starts also declined by 35 per cent, from 11,424 in February to 7,440 in March. Single-detached starts, meanwhile, fell 33 per cent from 2,828 to 1,890.
Despite this decline, Ottawa’s pace of housing starts for March improved compared to the previous year. In March 2025, builders began work on 726 new units, compared to 707 in March 2024, an increase of three per cent. While single detached starts decreased six per cent from 113 to 106, multi-unit urban starts rose four per cent from 594 in March 2024 to 620 last month.
Nationally, CMHC says the annual pace of housing starts in March slowed compared with February. The agency says the seasonally adjusted annual rate of housing starts came in at 214,155 units in March, down from 221,405 in February.
