Kelowna sees one of Canada's steepest home price drops in past year
The median single-family home price fell 5.9% to $1.14 million, the seventh-highest decline among 65 cities surveyed.
KELOWNA — Kelowna had one of the country’s highest housing price declines over the last three months, according to a Royal LePage survey.
The Royal LePage House Price Survey and Market Forecast found the median single-family home price in the Central Okanagan city dropped 5.9%, to $1.14 million, over the last 12 months.
Only six other Canadian cities, including Burnaby/New Westminster, had higher percentage decreases.
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“The Canadian housing market has spent the past three months treading water, with home prices largely flat and national sales volumes on track to finish 2026 slightly below even the sluggish pace of 2025,” Royal LePage’s president and CEO Phil Soper said in a press release.
The survey measures single-family and condominium prices, and then determines an aggregate for 65 Canadian cities.
Kelowna’s median condominium price was down only 1.2%, so its aggregate price drop was 5.6%. That was also the seventh-highest figure among the cities surveyed.
Overall, Canada’s median home price decreased 0.8% over the year and was down 0.6% from this year’s second quarter.
Soper said autumn, the second-busiest season of the year, typically injects energy into the market.
“This year, economic uncertainty and concern that mortgage rates could move materially higher are keeping would-be buyers on the sidelines,” he said.
He said much of the reason for the real estate uncertainty is the ongoing trade tensions with the U.S.
“Global economic turbulence and escalating trade tensions with our neighbours to the south continue to weigh on buyer psychology,” he said. “Canadians’ confidence in buying and selling real estate is obviously tightly linked to the perceived stability of the country’s relationship with our closest trading partner.”
Statistics provided by the Association of Interior Realtors painted a slightly different story earlier this month, although the organization uses benchmark prices instead of median figures when coming up with its house prices.
AIR found Kelowna’s single-family benchmark price, which “represents a dwelling of typical attributes,” was between $1.06 and $1.07 million over the last three months. It was also an increase over last year’s benchmark price.
Royal LePage does not do a market forecast for all 65 cities in the price survey, but Vancouver is projected to have the largest price percentage decrease over the next year, at 4.5%, among Canada’s 10 largest centres. Overall, however, prices are expected to rise slightly.
“Price softening in the third quarter offset some of the gains made earlier in the year,” Soper said. “We expect a modest pickup in sales activity through the remainder of the fall, although persistent trade uncertainty could delay that improvement. The conditions for recovery are in place. Canada’s housing market is on a detour, not a derailment.”
Your Space Hamilton reported in October that the national benchmark price fell 0.4% during September and was 3.4% below a year earlier.
With files from Castanet