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Vancouver’s real estate market downturn is setting up a perfect storm. CMHC Deputy Chief Economist Aled Ab-Iorwerth warns that current market conditions—declining prices and increased inventory—are creating the foundation for an even worse affordability crisis by 2026.

His contrarian take challenges the widespread belief that today’s market correction will provide lasting relief. Instead, he predicts that reduced construction during the downturn will trigger explosive price growth when economic conditions improve.

What You’ll Learn

• Why Vancouver housing prices will surge again within two years despite current market weakness

• How vanishing individual investors threaten Vancouver’s condo construction pipeline

• Why today’s rental supply boom masks serious structural housing problems

• The narrow policy window Vancouver has to prevent the next affordability crisis

• How Vancouver’s housing shortage compares to worsening conditions in Toronto and Montreal

• Which alternative financing models could reshape Vancouver’s condo development

• Why construction productivity matters more than foreign investment restrictions

The Self-Correction Myth That Could Destroy Vancouver’s Housing Market

The biggest misconception in Vancouver real estate today? That the market will fix itself.

Ab-Iorwerth directly challenges this thinking:

“The concern would be we’re in a short-term downturn and nothing changes on the policy or the financing front. And so within a year or two, economic growth resumes, maybe population growth resumes. People have greater certainty on their incomes and they start going into housing in a big way again and we’re back off to the races.”

This isn’t just another market cycle. Vancouver follows the same dangerous pattern as chronically undersupplied markets like San Francisco and New York, where insufficient construction during downturns creates explosive price growth during recoveries.

“There are some academic US studies that show places like San Francisco, New York, they tend to be much more cyclical housing markets—they’re more boom and bust because they don’t build enough housing. You don’t see as much of this boom and bust in places like Atlanta or Houston.”
— Aled Ab-Iorwerth, Deputy Chief Economist, CMHC

Vancouver’s Condo Construction Is About to Collapse

Here’s the crisis most people aren’t seeing: Vancouver’s condo development depends almost entirely on individual investors who are now fleeing the market.

“The challenge which I have not figured out is how to get more investment into condominium apartments,” Ab-Iorwerth admits. “They’re relatively more affordable and there’s a heavy reliance on the individual investor to get more condo apartments built.”

The problem is these individual investors behave very differently from institutional players.

“They may have gone in a little bit too enthusiastically in 2020. Now the prices are going down a little bit and maybe we’re a little bit closer to the bottom than the top, but individual investors may be reluctant to go in at this time.”

Translation: Vancouver’s most affordable housing type—condos—is about to see construction dry up just when the city needs it most.

Why Vancouver Can’t Escape Canada’s Spreading Housing Crisis

Vancouver used to be unique in Canada for its housing affordability problems. Not anymore.

“This challenge that has long been obvious in Toronto and Vancouver is now starting to spread to the rest of the country,” Ab-Iorwerth explains.

Instead of getting relief as other markets struggle, Vancouver faces new pressure as people leave for cheaper cities.

“Population growth in Calgary and Edmonton is now much greater than in Toronto and Vancouver. We think housing is part of that.”

Vancouver’s high housing costs are literally driving economic growth to other provinces. This isn’t just a local problem—it’s an economic competitiveness crisis.

The Rental Market Illusion

Don’t let recent rental construction fool you into thinking Vancouver has solved its housing supply problem.

Yes, rental construction has increased thanks to government incentives. But Ab-Iorwerth sees troubling signs beneath the surface:

“There’s been a lot of supply of rental. I think that is a good thing because there’s so much pressure in the home ownership space and that will take some pressure off of home ownership. But there are also challenges in the sense that the rents that the developers are able to charge are not going up significantly.”

Weak rent growth signals underlying economic uncertainty that could quickly reverse when conditions improve, leaving Vancouver scrambling for rental supply again.

Vancouver’s Last Chance to Reinvent Real Estate Development

Current market conditions create a rare opportunity for fundamental change. As Ab-Iorwerth puts it:

“There does seem to be an opportunity here to explore new approaches by both governments, by the financial sector, construction companies.”

The question is whether Vancouver will seize this moment or waste it.

The Financing Revolution Vancouver Needs

Traditional condo financing through individual investor pre-sales is broken. Ab-Iorwerth suggests several alternatives that could transform Vancouver’s development landscape:

• Partial Ownership Models

  “Maybe there’s a different idea of ownership where you own 20% of your unit but then it’s a little bit rental.”

• Land Lease Structures

  “Maybe there’s the Singapore model where you don’t own the land, you lease the land and then you buy your share of the apartment structure, but you don’t own the land because you’re on a long-term lease.”

• Hybrid Development
  Combining “purpose-built rental with condos within the same building.”

• Private REITs

  New approaches through “private REITs that maybe have a different approach.”

Construction’s Productivity Crisis

Financing isn’t Vancouver’s only problem. The construction industry itself needs radical improvement.

“The productivity growth in residential construction has not been strong, to put it bluntly,” Ab-Iorwerth states.

The solution requires embracing “more automation or prefabrication” and experimenting to see if we can “get these towers built at a lower cost and faster.”

“Obviously these large apartment units, the condo units, we’re talking multiple tens of millions—10, 20, 30 million to produce these units. We need that money.”

What This Means for Vancouver’s Real Estate Industry

Different players face different challenges and opportunities:

• Developers must adapt to a world without reliable individual investor financing. Those who embrace institutional funding or alternative ownership models will gain significant advantages.

• Real Estate Agents need to prepare clients for the return of price pressure starting in 2026. Current opportunities won’t last.

• Policy Makers have maybe 18 months to implement meaningful reforms before market conditions tighten again.

  “There’s the old saying that you can’t let a crisis go to waste,” Ab-Iorwerth notes.

• Institutional Investors may find unexpected opportunities in traditionally individual investor-dominated markets, especially as new financing structures emerge.

The key difference between investor types matters:

“I think the large investors, the REITs, the pension funds and so forth, will tend to put the money down maybe more at the bottom of the market.”

“My view is if you’re taking a 10–20 year horizon, there are opportunities for a significant return on investment, but the individual investor and the large corporate investors will have different responsiveness to these horizons.”
— Aled Ab-Iorwerth, Deputy Chief Economist, CMHC

Frequently Asked Questions

Will Vancouver real estate prices recover in 2025?

No. Ab-Iorwerth expects 2025 to be a “very noisy year” with continued uncertainty extending into 2026. Recovery should begin in 2026, with prices starting to “go back up meaningfully” afterward.

How bad is Vancouver’s situation compared to Toronto?

Actually better. CMHC monitors Toronto “much more closely than Vancouver” because Toronto saw condo prices drop almost 14% compared to Vancouver’s 2.7%. Toronto had more extreme investor participation in 2020–2021.

Why did Toronto get hit harder than Vancouver?

“In 2020–21 Toronto went a little bit overboard on some of these new construction condos,” Ab-Iorwerth explains. “The investor class really got into condos at that time” more dramatically than in Vancouver.

Should Vancouver reconsider foreign buyer restrictions?

Probably not a priority. Foreign investors represent only about 3% of ownership on average.

“I was always a bit skeptical about the magnitude of it,” Ab-Iorwerth says.
The focus should be attracting capital for new construction, not restricting foreign investment.

How long will this downturn last?

Through 2026.

“My best guess is that this is going to last into 2026. There’s just going to be a lot of noise,” Ab-Iorwerth predicts.
Recovery depends on broader economic growth resuming.

Does immigration make Vancouver’s housing problem worse?

It’s complicated.

“If we want to accommodate increased immigration, then obviously we need to build more housing,”
but immigrants are also needed to actually build that housing.

Last updated June 24 2025 by Matt Scalena PREC.

This article features expert insights from Aled Ab-Iorwerth, Deputy Chief Economist at CMHC, shared during his interview on the Vancouver Real Estate Podcast with hosts Matt and Adam Scalena. Listen to the full episode above.

📄 Full Podcast Transcript – Interview with Aled ab Iorwerth

Adam Scalena:
We’re here with Aled ab Iorwerth, he is the Deputy Chief Economist at CMHC. Thank you so much for taking the time today.

Aled:
Thank you.

Matt Scalena:
Thanks very much. Maybe for our listeners, can you start by telling our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Aled:
Sure, so I’m basically a hardcore economist. I had that academic training a long time ago. I was at the Federal Department of Finance for quite a while, but now I’ve been at CMHC for almost eight years, talking about housing, looking at housing across Canada, trying to understand the problems and going on about how we need to build more housing. It’s one of these jobs that you sort of add at all the time, but eventually people will start to build the housing.

Adam Scalena:
So what came first, being a hardcore economist or hardcore about housing?

Aled:
The economist started it. I did my PhD at Western and that was fairly good training. So then I did climate change, then I did productivity, then I did housing. All of these intractable problems that Canada faces.

Matt Scalena:
Which do you think is the most intractable?

Aled:
That’s a good question. I think there are solutions possible on the housing side. We’ve been going on about housing for a while, but on productivity in Canada, we’ve been at it for 30, 40 years and still people have not cracked it. Climate change is another one where I’m not sure the solutions on climate change and productivity are that clear. On housing, at least we can say we need to build more housing. How exactly you build more housing? Well, that’s maybe a different intractable problem.

Adam Scalena:
So Aled, CMHC just put out a report called Condominium Apartment Market Risks in Toronto and Vancouver. Can you outline the current state of the condominium markets in Toronto and Vancouver?

Aled:
What seems to have happened, and I would say we’re paying a little bit more attention in Toronto than in Vancouver, is that a lot of people started putting money down on new condominiums in 2020, 2021. And that’s for new construction. So simultaneously, there was quite a lot of money going into rental construction. Now with delays and the usual time lags that housing involves, quite a bit of that housing for which money was put down in 2020 is coming on stream.

So what we’re facing in the short term is an oversupply of particularly condos. Now my view is that some of this will self-correct because what we’re seeing as well as a short-term oversupply of condos is that the starts of condos are drying up. New investors are not putting money into the pre-sales, into the assignments. Money is being pulled back and supply of condos is going to really drop quite a bit.

Hopefully, if we get continued economic growth in a few years and current macroeconomic uncertainty is resolved, maybe there will be ongoing population growth and demand coming on stream, then we’ll be back to not having enough apartments. That’s my view at the moment. There’s a bit of nuance in it—this seems to be a short-term phenomenon of too much supply coming on too quickly.

Matt Scalena:
Can we talk a little bit about how these markets are similar? One thing that struck me was the difference in price declines in these two markets. So Toronto’s seen prices drop by almost 14%, whereas Vancouver’s at 2.7%. Can you talk about how the markets are similar but also how they’re different?

Aled:
I agree with the point you made and it alludes to what I said earlier—we’re monitoring the situation in Toronto much more closely than in Vancouver. The situation doesn’t seem to be an issue at all in Alberta; there’s just economic growth there and house prices are going up. Montreal is different because the structures tend to be a little bit smaller and the housing supply in Montreal reacted very quickly to higher interest rates. Once interest rates came down again, the market seemed to respond and housing supply is going back up in Montreal.

Coming back to Toronto versus Vancouver—it does seem that in 2020–21 Toronto went a little bit overboard on some of these new construction condos. I’m not completely sure why. Maybe the structures are just that much bigger. Because of that, there was more responsiveness to interest rates. The investor class really got into condos at that time. They put a lot of money into pre-sales and it seemed to have had a much greater effect than in Vancouver.

Now when interest rates went up, rent growth has not been that significant. As a result, some of those investors are trying to get out. So you’re seeing the short-term pressure on condo prices in particular. That seems to be the dynamic—there’s a lot more noise in it as well. There’s discussion in Toronto about whether condominiums will close or not. There may be legislative differences between Toronto and Vancouver. I think the regulation on the condo side is a little bit different across the provinces. But the bottom line is this effect of investors—there was a little bit too much enthusiasm and it seems to have been a lot greater in Toronto than in Vancouver.

Matt Scalena:
Would you say that in terms of systemic risks, is Toronto in a much different place than Vancouver?

Aled:
I’ll put it this way—I’m monitoring the Toronto situation a lot more closely than the Vancouver situation. But I don’t think we’re at the point of saying there’s a systemic issue as yet. We released a report last week, the Residential Mortgage Industry Report, where we look in greater detail at things like arrears and delinquencies.

There has been a sharp rise in problems in Toronto or in Ontario and to a certain extent in British Columbia, but they’re still at a very low level. So even though the percentage increase has been very high, the level of delinquencies and arrears are still very low and even relatively low compared to 2019. So we’re not at the stage of saying there’s a systemic issue in any way. It’s an area of concern.

I think there are greater risks in Toronto—the price decline has been bigger. I don’t think we’ve seen the bottom in the market yet. You hear anecdotes about some people bottom fishing and seeing if there are condos they can pick up on the cheap, but it’s really too early to say whether a bottom has been reached.

Some investors, I think, are still trying to get out of the market. They’re seeing condos that they’ve got money down on and that are close to being finished at a much higher price than the market. It seems more significant in Toronto. We need to monitor it, but it’s not at the stage of being systemic at this stage.

Adam Scalena:
We’ve been talking about investors and it sounds like there’s going to be quite an impact on a lot of investors not doing well on their investments and pulling back. Can you talk about the role of investors in building housing and what you think will be the impact of this current market?

Aled:
There’s a lot to unpack in that question. For example, I think there’s a significant difference between individual investors and large corporate investors—the REITs, the pension funds and the rest of it. Frankly, we need so much housing supply, we need everybody to put money down and invest. The scale of the challenge on housing supply is enormous.

But we have to recognize there are different behaviors and different responsiveness from different types of investors. I think the large investors—the REITs, pension funds, and so forth—will tend to put the money down maybe more at the bottom of the market. They’re in it for the long term, so they’ll have the money in the apartment structure for 10, 20, 30 years. They’re taking that very long-term horizon.

Individual investors—yes, we really need them, particularly as it’s the main source of funding in the condo sector. But we also have to recognize that they may be more likely to go in and out at the wrong time. So they may have gone in a little bit too enthusiastically in 2020. Now that prices are going down, and maybe we’re a little closer to the bottom than the top, individual investors may be reluctant to go in at this time.

My view is: if you’re taking a 10–20 year horizon, there are opportunities for a significant return on investment. But the individual investor and the large corporate investor will respond differently to those horizons. The large corporate investors will tend to go into the purpose-built rental sector. We have a tremendous need for more rental construction.

The challenge I have not figured out is how to get more investment into condominium apartments. They’re relatively more affordable and there’s a heavy reliance on the individual investor to get more condo apartments built. I don’t know how to get more long-term corporate investments into that space.

Matt Scalena:
It seems like we’ve talked about the financing model and how at this point, without investors in the market, there potentially needs to be some sort of shift in the model. Do you see that potentially happening—a larger shift in the way that we’re actually financing condos being constructed?

Aled:
The short answer is yes, but I don’t know exactly what it is.

Maybe we need a different type of model where we combine purpose-built rental with condos within the same building. I hear some discussion about private REITs that maybe have a different approach. Maybe there’s a different idea of ownership—where you own 20% of your unit, but it’s partially a rental. Or maybe there’s the Singapore model, where you don’t own the land—you lease the land, and you buy your share of the apartment structure, but you don’t own the land because you’re on a long-term lease.

I think there are ideas out there. What we end up with—I can’t really know. But I think we need to experiment with more of these models of alternative financing and see what works, because we clearly need the condominium apartments. They’re generally more affordable, relatively more affordable home ownership options, and they also provide the density that we need in downtown areas. Clearly, we need some sort of ownership structure with density in city centers—but I’m not entirely sure our current financing model works.

Adam Scalena:
There’ve been some incentives for developers to build market rental, but there’s also currently downward pressure on rents. Can you talk about what’s happening in market rental right now?

Aled:
It’s a similar observation. There’s been a lot of supply. The government, through various programs—the Apartment Construction Loan Program and various insurance programs—has really encouraged rental to be built. So there’s been a lot of supply of rental.

I think that’s a good thing because there’s so much pressure in the home ownership space, and this will take some pressure off of home ownership. But there are also challenges, in the sense that the rents that developers are able to charge are not going up significantly. The economy has not been really strong. There’s been macroeconomic uncertainty, and so rent growth has not been great.

I also see that there’s something we need to dig into a little bit more—I have this feeling that a lot of the structures have been for baby boomers downsizing from single detached to apartments. So some of those rental structures are not exactly cheap. If they’re aiming at higher-income households who are less likely to move these days, then there may be short-term challenges.

Matt Scalena:
Going back to the market—in your mind, Aled, is this downturn kind of a regular market cycle? Or is this somehow different? Is this some sort of more profound shift in the way things are done in Canada?

Aled:
The short answer to your question is: I hope so. Whether that transpires or not is more difficult.

The concern would be we’re in a short-term downturn and nothing changes—on the policy front, on the financing front, or whatever. And so within a year or two, economic growth resumes, maybe population growth resumes, people have greater certainty on their incomes—and they start going into housing in a big way again. Then we’re back off to the races, and prices are going up too rapidly because we haven’t built anything this year or next. So I think that’s the concern.

There are some academic U.S. studies that show places like San Francisco, New York—they tend to be much more cyclical housing markets. They’re more boom and bust because they don’t build enough housing. You don’t see as much of that in places like Atlanta or Houston. So that’s the negative side.

There’s the old saying that you can’t let a crisis go to waste. So there does seem to be an opportunity here to explore new approaches—by governments, the financial sector, construction companies. Are there new ways we can build? If there’s less pressure on government processes, can we take this opportunity to reform those processes? Can we experiment with new financing approaches?

The opportunity is there to experiment with these new approaches. Will these be grasped or not? That’s the challenge.

Matt Scalena:
CMHC just this morning released updated estimates on Canada’s housing supply gaps. There’s this weird juxtaposition—we’re talking about a slow market, declining rents, lots of inventory. And these revised estimates are basically calling for doubling the number of houses built in the country over the next decade. Can you unpack that study and what it’s all about—and maybe get specific with some of the numbers?

Aled:
It’s a different story across the country as well. The first thing I’ve already hinted at is that we’re taking a 10-year horizon for how much housing needs to be built.

As you may well know from the West Coast, going through the approval process is a multi-year process—three years, five years, plus. Construction time, one to two years. So we’re looking a decade out because of these adjustment periods.

Based on that—and based on our long-term economic and demographic projections, where we think interest rates will be, and how much housing supply we think there will be—we’re seeing, in the long term, a challenge to affordability.

The short-term effects that we’ve just been discussing are really difficult to time. But as I may have hinted earlier, I’m seeing next year as a time when prices might start to go up again, with not much housing supply having taken place in the interim. Prices could go up again and then we’re back in an affordability crisis—and then the government acts again. It becomes very cyclical.

What we’re trying to do is get away from that and concentrate on the long term—how much we need systematically over the next decade.

The picture is different across the country. What we’ve said in the past about Vancouver and Toronto remains true: there needs to be a lot more housing supply built in Toronto and Vancouver. Affordability is becoming a widespread issue across Canada. Even for those who’ve benefited from higher house prices—their children are now staying with them. There are just a lot of problems. So we need housing supply, clearly, in Toronto and Vancouver.

What we are recognizing with this report is that this challenge, which has long been obvious in Toronto and Vancouver, is now starting to spread to the rest of the country. We’re looking at how the rest of the country can get back to affordability levels we had in 2019, prior to the pandemic.

There have been a lot of changes—not because of the pandemic itself, but due to work-from-home technologies, people moving across the country to take advantage of affordability. Population growth in Calgary and Edmonton is now much greater than in Toronto and Vancouver. We think housing is part of that.

There’s been a lot of loss of affordability in Nova Scotia—people are moving there to take advantage of lower housing costs.

All of these changes are taking place across the country. What we’re looking at in this report is how we can at least get affordability back to 2019 in the rest of the country.

The other areas now being affected include Ottawa—and in particular, Montreal. There’s been a significant loss in affordability in Montreal over the last five years, and we really need to increase housing supply there.

Montreal has historically been a very affordable city. But with economic growth and the technological changes brought about by the pandemic, we need to drastically increase housing supply in Montreal.

Given the way we’ve set up the modeling, Montreal is now the new challenge. I used to talk about Toronto and Vancouver being the challenges—and now it’s Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal.

Matt Scalena:
Just thinking back to the question that the new housing minister, Gregor Robertson, was asked—in your mind, just thinking of 2019 affordability levels (that’s six years ago), should housing prices go down?

Aled:
The short answer is no. There’s a lot of nuance in that answer, but the way I would phrase it is this: what we’re trying to do with this modeling is to see the impact of increasing housing supply. As we already discussed, this is not an overnight fix. You can’t increase housing supply by X million units overnight. This will take time—we have a decade-long horizon.

What we are anticipating is that we improve the approval process, improve government policies, get the business sector to improve productivity, and ultimately build more housing. What will happen over time is more housing being built. Canadians may begin to think, “Well, we’re not going to make as much capital gains on our housing,” so maybe they’ll put less money into housing, or they won’t buy as big. This will take some demand pressure off over time.

The critical issue is that it’s a long-term process. Ideally, with stable prices and rising incomes, affordability improves. We’re not suggesting that we can magically develop 300,000 housing units overnight and crash the housing market. That’s not the way to get long-term affordability. The dynamics are very different from what happened in 2008 in the U.S., where a financial crisis caused housing prices to drop dramatically.

Adam Scalena:
Can you talk about the role of immigration and how that’s been accounted for in the studies?

Aled:
In our modeling approach, we use a very elaborate model of demographics—population, immigration, different age cohorts—and then layer on economic characteristics. We’re fully up to date with Statistics Canada’s population projections, so that is fully incorporated in our model.

Again, it’s a double-edged sword. If we want to accommodate increased immigration, we obviously need to build more housing. That’s always been our traditional approach: population growth is good—just build more housing. There are also arguments that some immigrants are essential for producing housing, both skilled and unskilled. So in that way, immigration helps enable supply.

Matt Scalena:
Just thinking about how affordability plays out in a best-case scenario over the next 10 years—without house prices going down. One thing that strikes me is that what you described makes it less appealing for the mom-and-pop investor. It’s not an exciting space with that kind of long-term outlook. Do we need to revisit the foreign buyer ban? What’s your take on the role of foreign investment in housing?

Aled:
The role of foreign investors has been around for a while. I have to admit I’ve always been a bit skeptical about its magnitude. The latest statistics continue to suggest that foreign investors are not a major part of the price increase story.

On average—and this is from memory—the share of ownership is around 3%. But of course, you can pick and choose your data. If you look at recent apartment units in Richmond, for instance, ownership might go up to something like 20%. So I don’t think foreign investors have been a dominant factor in explaining price growth. They do add to demand at times, but…

I think the longer-term question is around the tremendous need for capital investment in housing. These condo and apartment structures we’re talking about cost tens of millions—$10, $20, $30 million to produce. We need that money. So if we want to increase supply, and given the demand for capital, I could see a lot more investment being required—specifically targeted at new construction.

Adam Scalena:
What other hurdles do you see as the biggest challenge to actually delivering housing? Obviously, we’ve talked about the state of the economy and investors pulling back. I know in BC one of the biggest challenges seems to be around policy and red tape. Are there other things you’re recognizing as challenges?

Aled:
Yes—and the two are definitely interrelated.

One, as you mentioned, is red tape. We continue to believe that there are challenges in terms of regulation. We did an official survey last year looking at the extent of regulation, and interestingly, we found regulation was significantly higher in Vancouver and Toronto than in other places—which correlates quite well with affordability challenges.

We’re digging further into those results and—this may be getting a bit nerdy—but we now have new findings suggesting that regulations are causing a loss in affordability. For economists, the issue of causality is a big deal, and our newer results strengthen what we had found before.

So yes, regulations and red tape do hurt affordability. I would also extend that to various government fees. I think the federal government is committed to reducing them, and the BC government has expressed interest in reforming those as well.

But the bigger picture is that these regulations also have long-term effects on private-sector construction. Productivity growth in residential construction has not been strong—frankly, it’s been weak. There’s a high-profile U.S. academic paper that described construction industry productivity as “pathetic.” It’s not great anywhere in the world, and it needs improvement.

Some argue that construction companies are operating in heavily regulated systems and therefore have no incentive to innovate. That may be partly true. But we also need the private sector to develop new technologies. We talked about new financing techniques—but there must also be new building techniques: more automation, more prefabrication. We need experimentation in this area too, so that we can build towers at a lower cost and at a faster pace.

Matt Scalena:
Maybe as a final question, Aled—how long do you think this downturn lasts? When do we get back to healthy sales volumes? We’ve been consistently below 10-year averages in Vancouver for a while now. What are your 1-, 3-, and 5-year outlooks on pricing?

Aled:
I’ll go in reverse.

One year: I’d be quite pessimistic, to be honest. When I was asked about forecasting last year, I said that 2025 would be a very noisy year. By that, I meant macroeconomic uncertainty, the condo overhang, lots of debate and concern about what’s going on. When there’s that much uncertainty, people delay decisions. They hold off.

Three years: Assuming a relatively soft landing—meaning economic growth recovers next year—I would expect recovery to start in 2026.

Five years: Two or three years out, I think prices will start to rise again meaningfully. The supply side is really pulling back at the moment, and that will set the stage for price growth once demand returns. So yes—2025 difficult, 2026 starting to recover, and three to five years out, we’re back to price increases.

Adam Scalena:
How can people find out more about what you’re up to, and of course, CMHC and these reports?

Aled:
I’m always on LinkedIn, but all of our reports are also on CMHC. There’s a very extensive packaging—there’s a report, an HTML profile with a lot of graphics—so there’s a lot of information on the CMHC website.

Adam Scalena:
Perfect. Well, thanks again for taking the time today.

Matt Scalena:
Yeah, thank you so much for your time.

Aled:
Thank you. Thanks.