Ottawa’s 2024-2025 housing market was and continues to be slippery, according to a presentation to a sold-out audience at Hello 2025 / Goodbye 2024, organized by the Greater Ottawa Home Builders’ Association (GOHBA) Feb. 6.
Cheryl Rice is president of real estate consultancy PMA Brethour Realty and her presentation, like the event, is an annual one and much anticipated by her audience of Ottawa homebuilders, renovators and others. This time, as she noted at the beginning of her detailed analysis, she had prepared a couple of versions of the presentation, with the latest news on United States tariffs dictating which version she went with.
That news continues to be a moving target, which Rice’s presentation acknowledged. “If one thing is certain, 2025 is going to bring a lot of uncertainties,” she said.
In the end, she steered a middle ground between grim and optimistic forecasts, saying the Ottawa housing market entered the fraught events of 2025 — possible tariffs, federal and provincial elections, jittery consumers — in a position of strength and with its trademark resiliency. That, she said, leaves her with “a glimmer of hope” for the industry this year.
2024 by the numbers
Noting that resale homes constitute most of Ottawa’s housing stock and are a key driver of trends in overall housing sales, pricing and supply, Rice detailed the movement of the resale market over the past five years.
The buying mania of the peak pandemic years — 2020 and 2021 — which was inspired at least in part by FOMO (fear of missing out), shuddered to a two-year halt in 2022, with sales tumbling as inflation and other factors threw up roadblocks to would-be buyers.
By the end of 2024, and thanks in part to a slide in Bank of Canada interest rates from five to 3.25 per cent last year, resales had returned from the pandemic-era sellers’ market to a balanced one. The year finished with promising sales numbers (13,526 for the year), modest prices increases (an incentive to buyers) and inventory growth (another buyer incentive) — all auguring well for the current year.
MORE: Resales looking up by the end of 2024
New-home sales have followed a trajectory similar to resales over the past few years, with sales far exceeding the 10-year average of 4,545 homes during the pandemic. Accelerating costs, shrinking supply and other factors then pushed sales sharply downward in 2022 and to a four-decade low in 2023.
MORE: 2024 new-home sales end on a strong note
Last year saw a resurgence of new-home sales to 3,708 thanks to lower interest rates, 35-year amortizations, price cuts by builders (up to $100,000 in some cases, said Rice) and other incentives. Those price cuts brought the average price of a new-build single in 2023 and 2024 back under the $1 million threshold that they had hit in 2022. Townhomes, which had averaged more than $700,000 in 2022, fell back to the mid- to high-$600,000s in 2023 and 2024.
Sales last year were still below the 10-year average, but “at the finish line, 2024 marked strong signs of recovery with good momentum across both resale and new-home markets,” said Rice.
2024-2025 Ottawa housing market: What’s coming down the pipe
The word “if” was heard a lot when Rice turned to 2025 in her look at the 2024-2025 Ottawa housing market.
“Should there be a severe (Canadian) economic downturn as a result of (U.S.) tariffs … a recession is going to be really hard to avoid,” she noted. However, if a recession occurs, the Bank of Canada could further cut interest rates, making homes more affordable and keeping demand stable. At the same time, tariffs could cause building costs to rise and construction to slow, along with pushing rental demand and therefore rates higher.
In other words, it’s all about as predictable as a day in the life of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Rice foresees homebuilders continuing to sharpen their pencils and offer incentives for entry-level buyers and investors in 2025. She also urged further action to resolve the housing crisis, including diversification of supply chains, investment in cost-efficient construction methods such as modular building, and faster response from local government to speed up and control the cost of homebuilding.
Referencing what she termed a “tricky” glance at the coming months, Rice said the first quarter of the year, with the threat of tariffs hanging in the air until at least the beginning of March, could leave buyers feeling “uncertain” about committing themselves. On the other hand, if tariffs are imposed, they will work themselves through the system and, barring any further disruptions by the U.S., “there’s been enough pent-up demand created to deliver a strong spring market.”
Inching herself out on a limb, Rice concluded that, if the economy stays stable “and Canada remains a sovereign nation” — drawing chuckles from the crowd — new-home sales in Ottawa will break 4,000 this year.
A “permacrisis” and women in homebuilding
David Coletto from Abacus Data also spoke at GOHBA’s session on the 2024-2025 Ottawa housing market, focusing his data-driven eye on Canadians’ perceptions of and reactions to the “unprecedented” changes we’ve seen over the past five years.
Ranging from rapid population growth thanks to high immigration (now curtailed), an aging population and the housing affordability crisis, these changes have produced what Coletto terms a “permacrisis” in our minds and a “scarcity mindset” that we don’t have enough or, if we do, that we could lose it all in a flash and need to defend it vigorously.
Those attitudes in turn have sparked the sharp decline in, for example, our belief the country is headed in the “right direction” — from 43 per cent in 2020 to 23 per cent at present, according to one of his recent surveys. They’ve also resulted in 40 per cent of young Canadians — the folks largely shut out of homeownership — believing it should be illegal to own more than one home.
(Disturbingly, fewer than 15 per cent of surveyed Canadians now rate climate change and the environment, the very things that most imperil us all, high on the worry scale.)
Taking equal-opportunity jabs at politicians Pierre Poilievre, Justin Trudeau and Doug Ford, Coletto called on everyone to “get out of the silos you often live in” and take a broader view of our problems, potential solutions and how we all relate to each other.
With both Trump and a likely change in the federal government bearing down on us, he concluded, “The next three to five years could be the most consequential in Canadian politics and in public policy generally, which means there’s a huge opportunity to drive an agenda that forces municipalities to make it easier to build homes, to reduce red tape and the cost of doing business … that’s the opportunity to drive the agenda forward.”
Tanya Buckley, senior vice-president at Cardel’s Ontario Home Division wound up Hello 2025 / Goodbye 2024 with a Q&A with Linda Olivieri Blanchard of Enercare. They spoke about Buckley’s career trajectory in the housing industry and women in the field.
Acknowledging that there has been progress in gender diversity in the traditionally male-dominated field, she nevertheless noted there’s plenty of room to do more, particularly as the industry faces challenges in attracting new trades specialists as older ones retire.
“I look forward to the day when we’re not having the conversation about (bringing women into) construction. In fact, we’re in construction.”
