Home sales fell across Canada in March, with uncertainty around U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs causing prices and demand to plummet, the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) said Tuesday.
The sale of homes fell 9.3 per cent in March compared with this time last year.
Compared with last month, Canada recorded a drop of 4.8 per cent in home sales. National home sales are down 20 per cent compared with November 2024.
The national average home price in Canada was $678,331 in March 2025, down 3.7 per cent from March 2024.
CREA now has a revised, cooler forecast for the year ahead. It expects 482,673 homes to be sold this year, a decline of 0.2 per cent. This is a revision from its earlier forecast, which was an 8.6 per cent increase in the number of homes projected to be sold.
“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,” CREA senior economist Shaun Cathcart said.
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“In short order we’ve gone from a slam dunk rebound year to treading water at best.”
The national average home price is forecast to decrease a slight 0.3 per cent annually to $687,898 in 2025, which is about $30,000 lower than forecast in early January.
British Columbia and Ontario are expected to see small declines in average home prices.
While other provinces are expected to see an increase in the average home price, the forecast for the hike is expected to be in the three to five per cent range for 2025.
CREA expects housing activity to pick up in 2026, with national home sales forecast to improve by 2.9 per cent to 496,487. This would mean the national figure would fail to crack the half-million mark for the fourth straight year.
Clay Jarvis, mortgage expert at NerdWallet Canada, said that while home prices were expected to take a beating because of tariff uncertainty, a 20 per cent drop since November was a “shock.”
“April, when the world hit peak tariff hysteria, is likely to be even worse for the market. But now that Trump’s rolled back many of his tariffs and may do so for those he put on Canadian automobiles, buyers might inch back into the market before the summer,” he said.
“Mortgage rates are fairly inviting, and people can only take so much noise before they block it out and get on with their lives.”
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