A developer in Surrey, British Columbia, listed 30 brand-new condos for sale to a single buyer at once, at prices 15 to 20% below their original asking prices. Within hours of that listing going public, 50 different groups reached out. Not over a week – within hours.
And that deal wasn’t a one-off. The same real estate firm handling it immediately received a call from a developer in East Vancouver who needed to offload 18 more units. Then another call about eight townhouses in Victoria.
This is what Vancouver’s condo market looks like right now. Developers who spent years building towers are quietly – sometimes very quietly – trying to exit as fast as they can. And the way they’re doing it is telling us something important about where this market actually is.
How 2,500 Unsold Condos Became 5,400 in One Year
To understand why bulk sales are happening, you have to understand just how much unsold inventory is sitting out there.
According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, about 2,500 newly built condos were sitting vacant and unsold across Metro Vancouver as of late 2025. That number had doubled in just one year. And according to data from Rennie and Associates, by December 2025 the figure had climbed to over 5,400 completed unsold units – nearly matching the all-time record set back in December 1995.
Unsold completed condos in Metro Vancouver climbed from 2,500 units in late 2025 to over 5,400 by December, nearly matching the all-time record set in December 1995.
Think about that for a second. Vancouver in 2025 had as many unsold completed condos as it did in 1995, in a market that spent the better part of two decades being called the hottest in North America.
The units are piled up mostly in Burnaby – especially along the Metrotown corridor – as well as Coquitlam and Surrey City Centre. These are areas where multiple towers started construction during the 2020 to 2022 presale boom, when interest rates were near zero, and investors were buying anything with four walls. Those towers are now finished. Many of the investors are gone.
Greg Zedy, president of Rennie, called this the highest level of developer-owned unsold inventory in 24 years. And Vancouver’s share of the national problem is outsized: the city accounts for 28.7% of all unsold completed homes in the entire country, despite being a fraction of Toronto’s size. That’s not a footnote. That’s the core of the problem.
Why Sitting on Empty Units Is Not an Option
Here’s the thing about holding an unsold condo. It doesn’t just sit there quietly. Every month it’s empty, the developer is paying property taxes, insurance, financing costs, and strata fees. The meter is running with no income coming in.
In some projects, units are selling at a pace of one or two per month. At that rate, it could take years to fully sell out a building. For a developer who borrowed money to build it, that timeline is brutal.
So some of them are doing calculations. Take a 15-20% hit up front. Sell everything at once to a single sophisticated buyer. Close in 30 days. Stop the bleeding.
Mark Goodman, principal of Goodman Commercial in Vancouver, put it plainly in an April 2026 interview with Daily Hive. Developers are essentially saying: “Oh, forget it. We’ll take a bigger loss, but I won’t be stuck dealing with this for two years.” That’s not a business strategy. That’s someone cutting their losses before things get worse.
What makes this unusual is that these bulk deals are sometimes being handled quietly at first, shared only with a select group of buyers. There’s a practical reason for that. If the bank finds out the building just sold units for $200 to $250 per square foot less than what earlier buyers paid, those earlier buyers might not be able to get the same mortgage they were counting on. Some might walk away from their deposits entirely. The ripple effects go well beyond the developer.
The Data Behind the Collapse
These aren’t isolated stories. The numbers across the presale market are historic lows across almost every metric at once.
In February 2026, only 64 new presale homes launched across all of Greater Vancouver and the Fraser Valley – across just three projects. A normal February typically sees more than 1,100 units hit the market. February 2026 came in at about 6% of the historical average.
A typical February sees more than 1,100 new presale units launch across Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley. February 2026 saw just 64.
In Q1 2026, there were zero concrete high-rise launches in Metro Vancouver. The same quarter a year earlier had 152. January 2026 saw residential sales total just 1,117 – down nearly 29% year-over-year and about 31% below the 10-year average. The GVR’s own chief economist called 2025 one of the lowest annual sales totals in over two decades.
The condo benchmark across Metro Vancouver sat at around $767,000 in March 2026, down 7.8% year-over-year. By April, the average condo selling price was still falling. In May 2026, the overall sales-to-active-listings ratio for the region sat at 13.1% – hovering just above the 12% threshold that separates a buyer’s market from balanced territory, and Vancouver has been right at that edge for months. Active listings across Metro Vancouver in May 2026 were 16,917 – nearly eight months of inventory and well above the 10-year average of about 12,567.
Presale transactions across the province totalled just 124 units in Q1 2026. In Q1 2021, that number was nearly 6,000. These aren’t dips. These are historic lows across almost every single metric at once.
Who’s Getting Hurt Most Right Now
The group in the worst position right now is people who bought presale condos at the 2021 and 2022 peak. They put down deposits expecting prices to keep climbing through construction. Instead, the market went the other direction.
According to analysis from Rain City Properties, those buyers are now facing losses of $100,000 to $500,000 or more as their units complete in a softer 2026 market. Some are choosing to walk away from their deposits entirely rather than close at a price that’s higher than what the condo is actually worth today.
Investors have largely already left. Their share of new condo purchases dropped from around 50% of the market to just 7%, according to Vancouver House Finders, citing industry data. The math stopped working when vacancy rates in Metro Vancouver more than doubled to 3.7% – a 30-year high, according to the CMHC’s 2025 rental market report. When vacancy is that high and rents are softening, the numbers on an investor-owned condo simply don’t close.
The presale model that Vancouver basically ran on for 30 years is genuinely in question. Ryan Wise, lead analyst at Rennie, told Business in Vancouver in April 2026: “It’s too soon to know for sure if that model is dead. That sentence alone would have been unthinkable in 2021.”
The Government Just Stepped In, And That Changes the Timeline
While developers were quietly working through bulk sales on their own, the federal and BC governments decided the inventory problem was big enough to require direct intervention. In June 2026, Ottawa and Victoria announced a $3.2 billion package that includes buying up to 2,200 unsold, vacant condo units across Metro Vancouver and converting them into non-market affordable housing, with funding aimed at lowering development costs for builders.
The politics around this are genuinely contested. Critics, including opposition politicians and housing advocates, have called it a bailout for developers who overbuilt on the assumption that offshore demand and investor appetite would continue to absorb new supply indefinitely. Prime Minister Mark Carney has openly acknowledged the core issue driving the plan, stating plainly that developers are stuck because they don’t want to sell at a loss. Whether this is sound public policy or a transfer of risk from private balance sheets to taxpayers is a debate that will keep playing out, and reasonable people land on different sides of it.
But set the politics aside for a moment and look at what this actually does to the numbers we’ve been tracking throughout this article.
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s count of completed, unsold condos in Metro Vancouver has been growing for over a year, climbing toward its highest level since the mid-1990s. A government purchase of 2,200 units doesn’t just dent that number. Depending on which CMHC count you’re using, it could absorb somewhere between a third and half of the entire unsold inventory pool in one move.
That matters for anyone trying to time this market. Up to this point, the oversupply has been the single biggest reason developers were willing to deal: bulk sales at 15 to 20% below asking, sophisticated buyers picking up new product at 25% below peak, and a presale model that analysts openly questioned the survival of. All of that leverage exists because there’s more inventory than there are buyers.
A government purchase of this size doesn’t eliminate that imbalance overnight, but it does start closing the gap faster than organic absorption alone ever could. If a meaningful chunk of the standing inventory gets pulled off the market through this program, the math shifts. Fewer empty units sitting on developers’ books means less desperation to dump inventory at a discount, which means the unusually steep pricing we’ve seen in 2026 has less reason to stick around.
Whether this turns out to be good policy or bad policy is a separate question from whether it works as a market correction. And purely as a market correction, it’s a meaningful one. If you’ve been waiting on the sidelines for the right entry point, this guide to buying a presale condo in BC is worth a read now rather than later, because the conditions that created today’s pricing are being actively, deliberately unwound by policy, not just slowly self-correcting on their own schedule. That tends to compress the window rather than extend it.
What This Actually Signals for Buyers
Bulk sales at 15 to 20% below asking, combined with a benchmark price that’s already down nearly 8% year-over-year, means some of these units are trading at prices not seen in years. Goodman put it plainly: sophisticated rental housing investors can now get new product at roughly 25% below peak market values.
If you’re weighing whether now is the right time to step into a presale, this guide to buying a presale condo in BC walks through how to vet a developer, structure your contract, and avoid the mistakes that hurt 2021-22 buyers.
And with construction activity falling off a cliff and virtually no new towers launching, there’s a genuine argument that the supply shortage of 2028 and 2029 is already being built into these deals today.
The bulk sales trend is uncomfortable, but it’s also a sign that the market is clearing. Developers who have been holding on hoping prices would recover are starting to accept reality. That acceptance, painful as it is, is usually what happens near the bottom of a cycle – not the middle of a freefall.
If you want to see what’s actually available right now, including units affected by this kind of repricing, browse current Vancouver presale listings.
The detached segment in Greater Vancouver is already showing early signs of life. Detached sales were up 14% year-over-year in April 2026. That segment historically leads the condo recovery by two to four quarters. If that pattern holds, condo prices may find their floor sometime in the second half of 2026 or into 2027. But the condo market is not there yet. Inventory is still elevated, new launches are nearly non-existent, and buyers who got caught at the 2022 peak are still working through the damage.
Monthly MLS® Sales
3-year Market Trends
Three years of monthly sales, side by side: Greater Vancouver REALTORS® vs. Fraser Valley Real Estate Board. Watch the seasonal swings, then compare where we are now against where we’ve been.
The chart below is best experienced in landscape mode. Please rotate your device.
For anyone sitting on the sidelines right now – whether you’re a first-time buyer, an investor, or someone who already owns a condo and is wondering what happens next – the bulk sales are not a reason to panic. They’re a sign the market is repricing, loudly and sometimes messily, but repricing.
The bigger question is what happens when that repricing is done, construction has all but stopped, and demand eventually comes back. If history is any guide, the window to buy at the bottom doesn’t stay open very long.
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