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Toronto Townhouses Down 8% In April. Detached Held. Here's What's Actually Happening.
- Gary McGowan
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
The TRREB April 2026 Market Watch is out, and the numbers tell a different story than most people are expecting.
Sales are up 7% year over year. Just under 5,900 homes sold across the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board. New listings are down. Average sale price sits at roughly $1,051,000, down about 5% from a year ago.
So far, nothing too dramatic.
But dig one layer deeper and the surprise shows up.
Townhouses Took The Hit, Not Detached
Most people assume detached homes get hit first when the market softens. That's not what happened in April.
Detached sales volume was up almost 10%. Condos are seeing real movement under $400K, with first-time buyers finally finding entry points that work on their budgets.
Townhouses? Down close to 8% year over year on average price.
That's the segment that took the biggest hit, and it's worth asking why. If you own a townhouse right now, that's the conversation to have with your Realtor: what's driving the gap, and what does the rest of 2026 likely look like for your specific neighbourhood and product type.
Where Are All The Listings?
Here's what's been on my mind. We're already into the second week of May. March, April, and May are historically when the Canadian market gets its inventory. Most families want to move in the summer because nobody wants to drag kids out of school in October.
But active listings across the board are sitting at about 25,000. We've hovered around 65,000 total annual sales the last few years. A healthy market does 90,000 to 92,000.
We're not there. We're not close.
Dion Begg, my mortgage broker partner on the podcast, said it well. He expected more Canadian families to hit a financial wall this spring and put homes on the market out of necessity. Power of sale numbers are climbing. Credit card and car payment defaults are climbing. He calls those "the canary in the coal mine."
But the listings aren't matching the financial pressure. Households are holding on by threads instead of selling.
My opinion: that gap closes eventually. Either the economy gives families more breathing room, or the spring 2027 market looks very different from this one. Either way, the people sitting on equity right now and waiting for clarity are the ones with the most options heading into next year.
The $29,000 Tax Move Most Brokers Won't Mention
This part is for buyers, especially first-time buyers, and the Realtors helping them.
Dion walked a U of T professor through this last week. The client makes $170K a year, has $100K sitting in a regular savings account earmarked for a down payment, and isn't closing on a home until September.
Most mortgage conversations stop at "great, you've got the down payment." Dion's didn't.
He looked at the application and saw two things the client wasn't using: RRSP contribution room, and an unmaximized First Home Savings Account.
Here's what they did:
$60,000 from savings into the RRSP
$8,000 from savings into the FHSA (the annual maximum)
Total contribution: $68,000
That $68,000 contribution generates a tax deduction on a $170K income at roughly a 44% marginal rate. The math works out to about a $29,000 tax refund next spring.
The down payment is still there. The Home Buyers' Plan lets him pull RRSP funds tax-free for the purchase. And he ends up with $29,000 hitting his bank account next year that wouldn't have existed otherwise.
Nobody at his bank flagged this. No other broker he'd consulted flagged this.
My opinion: this is the difference between a transactional mortgage broker and a strategic one. Same goes for Realtors. Pattern recognition matters, and reps matter. The pros who have put in the years see things on a file that a silo-trained bank employee never gets to look at.
If you have an FHSA you haven't maxed out, or RRSP room you've never used, and you're buying in the next twelve months, this conversation is worth having before you close.
What To Watch In May
Three things on my radar for next month's report:
Whether spring listings finally show up or the inventory drought continues
Whether townhouses keep sliding or stabilize
Whether condo activity under $400K sustains, because that's the segment quietly building momentum
If you want the full TRREB Market Watch, you can download it directly from the board around the sixth or seventh of every month. We'll keep breaking it down here every cycle.
Got a specific neighbourhood or property type you want me to dig into next month? Send it over.
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