The Calgary housing market

The current figure is in the tiles at the top of this page, straight from the Calgary Real Estate Board and updated as each month is released. The benchmark is CREB’s MLS® Home Price Index — the modelled price of a typical Calgary home — so it is a like-for-like measure over time rather than an average of that month’s sales. We show the median and average alongside it, and they usually differ; the average in particular runs well above the benchmark because a handful of high-end sales pull it up.

Watch months of supply — how long the current inventory would take to sell at the current pace. Under about two favours sellers, two to four is broadly balanced, and above four favours buyers. Calgary has moved from roughly two and a half in late 2024 into the mid-to-high threes, so the city as a whole is now in balanced territory rather than the seller’s market of 2023–24. The current figure is on this page. Note that it differs sharply by property type: apartments carry far more supply than detached homes do.

Because they are effectively two different markets. Several years of strong apartment completions arrived at once, at the same time as investor demand cooled, so apartment inventory has built up while detached supply has stayed relatively tight. The result is a meaningful divergence in both price and months of supply between the two. If you are buying an apartment, you have more choice and more negotiating room than the city-wide numbers imply. If you are buying detached, you have less. The property-type table on this page shows both.

More than most people expect, and the effect is property-specific rather than city-wide. Lenders and default insurers watch local conditions, and in Calgary that shows up most in condominium lending: building-level policy on reserve funds, rental ratios, square footage and post-tension construction can restrict financing on a unit that looks perfectly ordinary on paper. Softening prices in a segment can also mean a tighter appraisal. It is one of the main reasons lender selection matters here, and why a decline at one bank often means very little.

The charts on this page run from January 2014, which covers the 2014–16 oil downturn, the long flat stretch that followed, the 2021–24 run-up and the softening since. The dated monthly reports cover the most recent two years. CREB publishes a month’s figures in the first few days of the following month, and these pages rebuild from our own copy of the board’s data as each release lands — including CREB’s periodic restatements of earlier months.