BC Housing Market August 2026: Asking Prices Freeze, Listings Keep Aging

Detached houses: 5,568 active listings. Median price $1,999,000. Median $768 per square foot. 77 days on market, up from 67. Detached is the slowest segment on the board by a wide margin and the only one where the typical listing has been sitting for more than a full quarter.

Fraser Valley: Asks Hold, Inventory Keeps Draining

The Fraser Valley closed August with 7,678 active listings at a $969,000 median and $537 per square foot across all property types. Inventory came down about 3 percent from July and is 9.1 percent below the June peak. Median days on market moved from 59 to 64. The board-wide median fell $10,000, and it is the same composition effect as Greater Vancouver rather than a real move: not one Fraser Valley property type median changed in August.

Fraser Valley condos: 2,094 active listings. Median price $499,000. Median $638 per square foot. 63 days on market. That median has now sat just under the $500,000 line for a third month, which matters more than it looks: a first-time buyer at that price pays zero property transfer tax. Fraser Valley condos are also the one segment on either board where average asking prices are still visibly drifting down rather than holding.

Fraser Valley townhouses: 1,791 active listings. Median price $799,900. Median $499 per square foot. 56 days on market. The townhouse median held the $799,900 line it reached in July, and the per square foot gap against Greater Vancouver townhouses is still roughly 37 percent. A Fraser Valley townhouse buyer is paying about six dollars per square foot for every ten a Greater Vancouver buyer pays.

The Detached Slide Stopped After Five Months

The single clearest thing in the August data is that the detached decline ended. The Greater Vancouver detached median stepped down every month of 2026: $2,190,000 in March, $2,148,000 in April, $2,098,000 in May, $2,050,000 in June, and $1,999,900 in July. Five consecutive drops of between $42,000 and $50,000. In August it moved to $1,999,000, a decline of $900.

A flat median on its own can be an artefact, so it is worth saying how we checked. Three separate measurements agree. The median held. The quartiles held, with the 25th percentile at $1,499,000 and the 75th at $2,998,000, both identical to the dollar against July. And the average asking price, which no single cluster of listings can pin in place, moved from $2,748,159 to $2,747,160, a drop of $999. The month before, that same average fell $26,699. The August move is smaller by a factor of 27.

The pattern repeats across the board. Here is what each Greater Vancouver segment did to its median asking price in August:

• Detached: down $900, after five straight months of roughly $50,000 declines.
• Condos: unchanged at $699,000, a third consecutive month.
• Townhouses: unchanged at $1,199,000.

Sellers are not cutting the way they were, either. Across the 22,294 residential listings active on British Columbia's two largest boards, 5,602 are asking less than they originally listed for. That is 25.1 percent, almost exactly the 25.0 percent we reported in July, with an average reduction of 6.1 percent or about $107,000. In July the price cutting was the story. In August it stopped accelerating.

What has not stopped is the drop in new supply. New listings coming onto Greater Vancouver fell almost 18 percent from July, and the Fraser Valley saw a similar drop of nearly 17 percent. Fewer sellers are arriving, and the ones already listed are holding their number.

More Than a Third of Listings Are Now 90 Days Old

Prices froze in August. Time did not. Median days on market for Greater Vancouver has risen every month since April: 44 days in April, 45 in May, 54 in June, 59 in July, and 66 now. That is the highest reading of our 2026 series, and the increase was universal. Days on market rose in all 14 cities we measured and in all six property type segments across the two boards, without a single exception.

The aging shows up more starkly at the tail. Measured the same way in each month, the share of active listings across Greater Vancouver and the Fraser Valley that have been on the market at least 90 days ran under 30 percent at the end of June, reached roughly a third in July, and sits above a third now. Around one active listing in ten has been on the market for at least 180 days. The typical Greater Vancouver home now takes 66 days to find a buyer, and a third of the inventory has been waiting for at least a quarter of a year.

Zealty holds the full sale history of the properties on the Greater Vancouver, Fraser Valley and Chilliwack boards, which makes it possible to compare what a home is asking today against what its owner actually paid for it. Of the 12,335 active listings across the two boards we can match to a previous sale, 18.5 percent are asking less than that last sale price, with an average gap of 8.9 percent. Among owners who bought in 2021 or later, 43.1 percent are asking below what they paid. Within that group, condos have now crossed a line: 52.3 percent of condos bought in 2021 or later and listed today are asking less than their purchase price, up from 50.7 percent in July. Townhouses are at 44.7 percent and detached houses at 33.6 percent.

One caveat worth stating plainly: an asking price below a previous sale price is not a realized loss. It is a starting position, and some of those listings will sell for more than they are asking today. It also does not account for what the owner has put into the property. What it does measure is how many sellers have already accepted that 2021 pricing is not available to them.

City-by-City Snapshot for August 2026

Surrey: 4,105 active listings. Median $989,000. Median $553 per square foot. 67 days on market. Surrey inventory came down about 2 percent and the median eased $10,000 from July, but days on market lengthened again, from 60 to 67. Surrey is the largest single pool of inventory on either board apart from the City of Vancouver, and at $553 per square foot it is well below the Greater Vancouver median of $831. That combination of scale and price per square foot is why Surrey sets the entry point for so many Metro Vancouver buyers, and those buyers took a week longer to commit in August than they did in July.

Burnaby: 1,857 active listings. Median $888,000. Median $816 per square foot. 63 days on market. Burnaby is the one city on this list where the median asking price went up, from $878,000 in July to $888,000, a $10,000 step in the opposite direction to almost everywhere else. Inventory barely moved, down 19 listings on the month, while days on market went from 58 to 63.

North Vancouver: 866 active listings. Median $1,298,000. Median $879 per square foot. 55 days on market. North Vancouver had the sharpest inventory drop of the four, down 6.6 percent, and its median eased from $1,324,900 to $1,298,000. Days on market moved from 46 to 55, a nine-day jump on what was the fastest-selling market of the four in July. It is still the fastest, but the gap has narrowed considerably.

Richmond: 1,905 active listings. Median $1,000,000. Median $773 per square foot. 75 days on market. Richmond held its median at exactly $1,000,000 for a second straight month while days on market went from 62 to 75. That 13-day increase is the largest of any city we track, and at 75 days Richmond is now the slowest major market in Greater Vancouver. For a buyer, a market sitting flat on price and lengthening this fast on time is where the negotiating room is.

What This Means Heading Into September

August was the month the BC price adjustment paused and the supply adjustment took over. Sellers stopped cutting, but fewer of them arrived, and the ones already on the market kept aging. Those two things pull in opposite directions, and September is where you find out which one wins.

If you are buying, asking prices have stopped moving, so the useful signal this month is how long a listing has been sitting. A seller at 90 days has a different set of options than a seller at 20 days, and better than one in three listings on the two boards is now past that 90 day mark. Sorting by days on market rather than by price will show you a different set of homes than it did in the spring.

The segment-level numbers point the same way. Richmond at 75 days, detached houses at 77, and Surrey at 67 are where sellers have been waiting longest. Condos in the Fraser Valley at $499,000 and Greater Vancouver at $699,000 both sit under the property transfer tax threshold for first-time buyers, which is worth up to $8,000 and does not change with the market.

If you are selling, the August data is a warning about pricing to the last comparable sale. The listings that are sitting are not sitting because the market moved under them this month. It did not move at all. They are sitting because they were priced against a market that existed several months ago, and holding the number has not fixed that for anyone yet.

The thing to watch in September is whether inventory keeps falling. Two months of decline after four months of building could mean the market is tightening, or it could mean listings are expiring rather than selling. Roughly 4,500 residential listings across the two boards came off the market unsold in August, and that is the number that decides which of the two it is.

Start Your September Search on Zealty

Every number in this post comes from live Zealty MLS data, refreshed throughout the day. August closed with asking prices flat across every property type on both boards, inventory down for a second month, and days on market at the highest level of the year. If you want to know the moment a property matching your criteria comes on, set up a saved search by neighbourhood, price range and property type and Zealty will email you the matches as they list.

Search active BC listings with live MLS data on Zealty and filter by region, property type and price to find the homes that match your plan for September.