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British Columbia residential home sales hit 10-year low in 2025

by Paul Henderson an hour ago 3 min read

Lower Mainland, Vancouver Island saw largest drops, prices aren’t following

British Columbia real estate was a tale of two zones for residential home sales in 2025. While the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island saw large year-over-year drops in unit sales, everywhere else was comparable to the year before or saw an increase.

Provincewide had the lowest number of residential home sales of any year over the last decade.

At the two extremes, unit sales in 2025 were down 16.5 per cent in the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board (FVREB) area, the second largest in the province, while they jumped up more than eight per cent in the Okanagan and the Kootenays.

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Editor's note: Statistics from small markets are inherently more volatile than those from large ones. In major regions, thousands of monthly home sales smooth out short-term changes. In smaller markets, a change of a few dozen transactions can produce large percentage swings without reflecting a major shift in conditions. This volatility isn’t a flaw, but it does require context. In small markets, single-month figures should be read cautiously, with greater weight given to raw counts and multi-month trends.

B.C. residential sales dollar volume was down 8.3 per cent to $67 billion in 2025. Unit sales were down 5.6 per cent year-over-year at 70,255 units, the lowest number since 2015 and substantially down from the 10-year-average of approximately 90,000 sales.

The average MLS residential price in 2025 was also down by 2.9 per cent to $953,345.

“Weakness in provincial market activity was concentrated in the Lower Mainland in 2025, with sales across the province recovering at different rates from tariff uncertainty,” said BCREA chief economist Brendon Ogmundson. “Looking ahead, we hope that steady mortgage rates and fading trade uncertainty with the U.S. will strengthen demand, leading to a broader recovery in the housing market.”

In the Greater Vancouver Real Estate Board (GVREB) in 2025, there were 23,730 sales, down 10.1 per cent from the 26,404 in 2024. In Chilliwack, the 2,318 sales for the year represents a 15.7 per cent drop over the 2,751 in the previous year.

FVREB’s drop of 16.5 per cent was from 13,815 in 2024 to 11,532 last year.

Differences in sales numbers in the real estate board areas that cover the North, Kamloops, South Peace, Vancouver Island and Victoria were negligible year over year.

Okanagan saw the biggest bump up of 8.8 per cent from 7,793 in 2024 to 8,476 in 2025. Kootenay sales were up 8.2 per cent from 2,731 to 2,954.

Across the province sales were down 5.6 per cent from 74,419 in 2024 to 70,255 in 2025.

With lower demand, are there lower prices?

While sales slumped in the Lower Mainland in 2025, the statistics continue the ongoing trend of price stagnancy in low sales months rather than actual lower prices.

For example, where the largest drop in unit sales occurred in the FVREB, the average selling price only dropped by 2.3 per cent to $1,013,785. The GVREB saw a 10.1 per cent drop in sales and just a four per cent drop in prices to an average of $1,240,222.

In the most affordable real estate board in the Lower Mainland, Chilliwack and district, the average sale price for 2025 was $764,751 down less than half a percentage point from $767,873 in 2024.

Prices on Vancouver Island went up year over year, specifically up 3.9 per cent to $1,011,263 in Victoria 2025 and up 2.5 per cent on the rest of the island to $752,540.

The most affordable homes in B.C. are, unsurprisingly, in the South Peace where the 398 homes sold in 2025 did so for an average price of $318,797, followed by the North there the 4,070 sales went for an average of $443,971.

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Paul J. Henderson
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