Deanne Whelan

The 2024 Canadian Housing Survey offers a detailed look at Canadians’ housing experiences and how they shape everyday life. This article highlights selected findings from the newly released 2024 results, focusing on future housing aspirations, core housing need and self-reported experiences of housing discrimination.

Key Highlights

• Homeownership is a goal for most renter households, but nearly 3 in 10 (28%) said that buying a home is not important to them. Homeowners are generally satisfied with the number of bedrooms they have, while renters would like to have more bedrooms than they currently have.
• Between 2022 and 2024, core housing need remained largely unchanged, with renters continuing to face much higher rates than homeowners.
• Households in the primary rental market face higher core housing need than those in the secondary market. Unsuitability caused 9.7% of core housing need cases in the primary rental market, compared with 3.2% in the secondary market.
• One-person households (20.4%) had the highest rate of core housing need among household types. Indigenous households reached 20.1% in 2024, underscoring ongoing housing challenges among key population groups.1
• Racialized people were 3 times more likely than non-racialized people to report housing discrimination. More than one-third of Black homeowners reported experiencing housing discrimination in their lifetime.

• Canada has not been immune to the recent rise in global bond yields, which reflects a more challenging backdrop for fiscal and monetary policy. These higher yields (which underpin fixed mortgage rates) are likely already impacting Canada’s housing market, with sales declining for the first time in six months in August.
• With the forces behind the climb in rates set to linger, we’ve upgraded our forecast for bond yields through next year, relative to our prior forecast in June. This upgrade comes even under our baseline assumption that the Bank of Canada remains on hold through 2027 amid near-target underlying inflation and an expected gradual easing in crude oil prices.
• Accordingly, our near-term forecasts for growth in Canadian home sales and average home prices have been downgraded. Canadian home sales are tracking a decline of about 5% this year and are unlikely to recover this lost ground in 2027. Although we still see roughly flat Canadian average home price growth this year, next year prices will likely expand at a sub-2% pace.
• While housing is likely to remain subdued in 2027, our projections envision positive (albeit modest) quarterly growth in both Canadian home sales and average prices. Even so, home sales are likely to remain well below pre-pandemic levels through next year. Anticipated quarterly gains are likely to be supported by the further release of pent-up demand. Job markets are also forecast to improve gradually, although the outlook has been downgraded relative to our prior projection due to the recent escalation in the Canada-U.S. trade conflict. Perhaps most crucially, this forecast depends on some downdrift in Canadian bond yields beginning in the fourth quarter and lasting through next year.

Highlights

• Canada’s supply gap is broadly unchanged from last year. Relative to our 2025 estimate, the supply gaps narrowed in Toronto and Calgary and remained unchanged in Vancouver. However, the supply gaps have widened in Ottawa and Montréal.
• Construction is expected to slow faster than demand, leaving Canada short of the roughly 417,000 to 469,000 homes needed each year to restore pre-pandemic affordability by 2036.
• Not building enough during the current housing downturn is a key risk. Near-term affordability improvements since 2023 may be difficult to sustain if housing construction does not keep pace with future demand. Although rental market conditions have eased, ownership supply is facing significant challenges.

Canada's housing market is entering a new phase. We see slower population growth, more balanced rental markets, improving affordability and elevated housing completions in many cities. However, the key risk is that Canada does not build enough during today’s market softening and falls short of housing when demand strengthens again. That would leave Canada significantly behind the 417,000 to 469,000 homes needed each year to restore pre-pandemic affordability by 2036.