Selling for Less Than 2017: Real Losses in Vancouver and Toronto, and Metro Vancouver's $4.4 Billion in Unsold Condos

Yes, some homes are selling today for less than their owners paid in 2017. A detached house in Richmond Hill, Ontario and a four-bedroom house on Vancouver's west side both just did it. And across Metro Vancouver, developers are sitting on more than $4 billion worth of finished condos and townhomes that nobody has bought, on the numbers the Globe and Mail and the Vancouver Sun published on September 15, 2026.

On this week's Coast to Coast Canadian Real Estate episode, my co-host Mike, who sells in the Greater Toronto Area, and I lined up real losses from both of our markets and then got into the unsold inventory problem here at home. The conversation went further than real estate by the end, into what this city should do with empty units while people sleep outside. This is where I land on all of it.

A Richmond Hill House That Sold for Less Than Its 2017 Price

Mike brought the Ontario example. A detached house in Richmond Hill sold just three days before we recorded, and it sold under its final asking price. That final asking price came after a long stretch of the owners playing around on the market before the house found its level.

The owners bought it in 2017 and sold it for less than they paid. That loss comes before you count inflation, REALTOR® fees, property taxes and everything else that comes with carrying a home for close to a decade.

Mike was a REALTOR® in 2017, two years into his career, and he remembers it as another peak. It was the first real wave of bidding wars in Ontario, almost as aggressive as 2021, just at a different price scale. Buyers lined up at properties on offer nights with deposit cheques in hand, sometimes until midnight, with 30 other people competing for the same house.

Comparing the 2017 photos to the 2026 ones, the owners had done some work: new flooring, some updated furniture in the pictures, new stairs and a redone bathroom. They didn't redo the kitchen, which in hindsight is probably a good thing given the loss. The backyard pool sat unused in both sets of photos, which is a funny way to market your home's main feature twice in ten years.

Even after that loss, what this four-bedroom, three-bathroom detached house sold for is still a price you can't touch in Vancouver. The lot was 88 feet deep, which Mike says is fairly typical for that newer part of Richmond Hill. In the city, he sees a lot of 40 by 110 lots as well.

A Vancouver West Side House That Sold Below Its 2017 Price

I matched Mike with a loss from Vancouver's west side. A four-bedroom, four-bathroom house just sold for less than it fetched in 2017, nine years ago. If you want the actual numbers on sales like this one, they're on the sold map (free account) in your free account.

The lot runs a little above the typical Vancouver lot, and the house was clean and move-in ready, with an open concept main floor. The kitchen felt a little small for that size of house and the bathrooms still had some of that old-school square tile, but you could absolutely move in and live there, then modernize over time by painting the cabinets white or freshening the exterior.

Before it hit the market, the owners tried to rent it out. They tried a couple of different rents, couldn't get either one, and then listed it for sale. That's a pattern I'm seeing more and more: owners testing the rental market first, finding the rents won't carry the property, and only then selling.

In that area, I think this was a solid buy. Fix it up, modernize it, do some exterior work, and I believe in a couple of years that house is worth a good deal more than this buyer paid.

Lot Sizes and Why They Matter in Vancouver Now

Vancouver lots run smaller than most people outside the city expect. Outside some pockets on the west side, 33 by 110 and 33 by 122 are typical, so you're around 3,500 to 3,800 square feet of land on average, and some go up to 4,000.

Lot shape matters more than it used to. With all the land use changes from the province, a lot of buyers want to demolish older homes and put up a multiplex. Lots with smaller frontages or shorter depths don't sell as well because they can't support the same build.

The architecture is different too. In Vancouver you'll see multiple elevations on the back of a house, bay windows and decks, and the garage almost always sits on the lane. A garage underneath the house is very rare in the city. Mike pointed out that in Ontario, an attached garage with direct access to the house is a huge feature because of the snow. They had temperatures near negative 50 Celsius last winter. We get rain.

Real Estate Doesn't Always Put Money in Your Pocket

Both of these owners basically lived in their homes for close to a decade and made no money on them. Mike put it well: real estate isn't always going to put money in your pocket, and right now we're not seeing it happen a lot. If either of these owners held for another ten years, it could be a different story. Whether a home turns out to be an investment depends on when you sell it. For a lot of people it was a house they enjoyed living in, and none of the investment talk matters at all. We got into more of this in our piece on condo losses and leaky buildings.

That's the honest way to look at the 2017 buyer selling today. It wasn't a bad decision to buy. It was a bad time to sell, and if you don't have to sell into this market, you have options.

How Many Unsold Condos Are There in Metro Vancouver?

Two reports came out on September 15, 2026. The Globe and Mail put the figure at $4.6 billion of unsold inventory, and the Vancouver Sun put it at $4.4 billion across Metro Vancouver. If the $4.6 billion number sounds familiar, figures in that range have been going around since the spring. Either way, it's over $4 billion.

The Vancouver Sun count is 5,300 finished but unsold condos and townhomes across Metro Vancouver. On that count, Vancouver isn't the leader. Burnaby is, with 1,200 units, mostly in the Metrotown and Brentwood areas. Vancouver follows at 958, then Richmond at 816 and Surrey at 559, with Coquitlam and Port Moody also on the list.

More than 1,300 of those units sit in buildings that were completed at least two years ago. This isn't new stock working through a normal sales cycle. These are old units. We're even seeing this with new duplexes and detached homes that haven't moved in two years, with GST still applying to the buyer.

Bigger Units Are the Ones Not Selling

The detail that surprised me most came from the president of Real Property Data, who found that larger condos of 1,500 square feet or more have a 41.6% unsold rate, compared with just 12.2% for units under 500 square feet.

You'll see plenty of comments online saying nobody wants to live in a dog crate, and buyers do want more space than a tiny one-bedroom. But at 1,500 square feet and up, the strata fees and carrying costs climb fast, and that buyer has other options at that price.

Developers are getting creative to move them. I was looking at an unsold unit in Burnaby where the developer was offering a credit and three years of paid strata fees just to get the deal done. If you're a buyer in this market, that's the kind of leverage that exists on finished, unsold inventory.

Why Not Put People in the Empty Units?

Whenever this inventory comes up, the same question follows in the comments. Vancouver has a serious homelessness problem, so why aren't 5,300 empty units, some of them two years old, being used to house people?

I think it's more complicated than it sounds. These units aren't owned by the city. A developer paid for every one of them, and someone has to own the property and pay for it. I don't think developers should be forced to hand them over.

Mike raised the other side of it. Owners who already bought into those buildings did it expecting one thing. If the building turns into something else, their property values could drop, they might not feel safe, and nobody is compensating them for that loss. He thinks housing like that has to be designed from the ground up, not added as an afterthought after people have already put their money in.

I agree. Vancouver already requires a portion of many new projects to be purpose-built rental, rent-controlled or social housing. That has created its own problems, including buildings where owners use the front door and social housing residents use a separate entrance around the side, which raises real questions about dignity. Mixing the two in the same building has been messy.

My view is that housing is a fundamental right, but that doesn't mean housing has to be something you own. Governments control land use and zoning, so they're the ones who should be providing affordable and rent-controlled options. They can swap land with a developer, grant more density elsewhere in exchange for units, or set the terms however they want. What I'd like to see are communities built with the resources right there: medical help, help getting off drugs and alcohol, help working through trauma and support returning to work. Housing someone without that doesn't solve the problem. As Mike said, it just moves the problems indoors.

Someone I spoke with recently came back from a trip to New York and told me the homelessness there was nothing compared to Vancouver, and Vancouver is a much smaller city.

The Housing Market Is Part of the Story

When I made a video on Burnaby's homelessness numbers about a year ago, the counts had jumped dramatically year over year. A lot of it wasn't the typical story people imagine. It included older people and seniors who'd been pushed out because they couldn't afford rent or a home anymore. Some had been deferring property taxes, sold in a weak market, came away with less than they'd hoped and didn't have enough left over. Real estate plays a part in that, and it's worth remembering when we talk about unsold units as just a number.

What This Means If You're Buying or Selling

If you bought at a peak, whether that was 2017 or 2021, the losses we're seeing are a reminder that timing your sale matters as much as timing your purchase. Selling into a soft market when you don't have to is how a home becomes a loss on paper. To see how your own area is doing, check the Kyle Mark Report.

If you're a buyer, the unsold inventory is real leverage. Developer credits, paid strata fees and units that have sat for two years are all signs of motivated sellers. Do your homework on carrying costs, especially on larger units, and know which municipalities are carrying the most unsold stock.

If you want help reading either side of that, book a call with me.