The REAL Market Report: August 2025

Well that went quickly! And by “that” I am indeed referring to summer. Technically, summer doesn’t end for another 11 days (September 21) but it feels pretty far behind us at this point. Cool mornings have been the norm for the past three weeks or so and that has set a certain “fall vibe” for everyone that starts their day before it hits 25 degrees at 10am.

For me specifically, my life has drastically changed now that summer has ended in the traditional sense. My wife has gone back to teaching after her maternity leave has ended and our daughter started daycare last week. Suffice it to say, my days look very different these days.

A friend of mine said “looks like you will be playing a lot of fall golf” and I had visions of watching the leaves turn colour while I walk down the fairway. Alas, I have been very busy work wise and have been spending more time at the office than I have all year.

But I am grateful to be busy amidst what has been a slow year for our real estate market. We are on pace for the slowest year of sales ever, as you well know if you have been reading these blogs in 2025. So I will gladly sacrifice my time on the golf course for more appointments and clients that are eager to work with me!

Now as we look back at August, which I consistently think of as the slowest month of the year, I was mildly impressed with the stats that came out. A longer look at the stats tells us that historically, August is not nearly the slowest month of the year. Colour me surprised!

August historically has more sales than any month from January, February or September to December. Wild. So much for the theory that everyone is completely gone for the summer and totally disinterested in the real estate market.

If you are curious to see the hierarchy of each month’s real estate sales across a 10 year average, I will post that at the end of the year when I have all the data. I am now extremely curious about this too.

Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves though, we have a month of numbers to peruse here.

I want to start start things off with new and active listings which are becoming the least interesting parts of this blog.

New listings last month at 942 is on par with most other months this year. That number is 119.6% of the 10 year average and the highest number of new listings for the month of August ever. Or at least as far back as I have data.

Active listings declined for the third consecutive month, however slightly and fell below the 2000 mark for the first time since May. There were still 1946 active listings at the end of last month, the peak in May was 2110.

This is interesting when we consider that new listings have been very high over that time span and monthly sales figures are still lagging well behind the 10 year average. Why then are active listings declining?

I think what we are seeing is sellers grow tired of listing homes that aren’t selling. The only other way for homes to come off the market if they don’t’ sell: cancellations and expiries. I just did a quick search and so far in September, there have been 119 cancelled listings and 37 expired listings. In that same time span, 52 homes have sold in London. So exactly 3 times as many homes were terminated or expired than sold.

Pretty eye opening actually.

Sale numbers had gained some momentum over June and July compared to the 10 year average so I was hoping to see August continue that trend. After all, that was the entire plot line of last month’s report.

The 413 sales in August beat my prediction of 399 (according to my wonderful little formula) representing 72.7% of the 10 year average. My margin of error on predictions had been growing over the past two months due to the previously mentioned stronger performances but in August, that error was only 3.5%. We’re back in the game.

June at 68.26% and August at 79.58% were the best marks so far this year outside of January (70.86%) which just so happened to be right before Trump’s tariffs kicked off. So August still had a strong performance comparatively this year despite falling from July’s peak.

This will be massively important in the fall. If sales continue performing closer to historical numbers, then 2026 could actually be a busier year. I’m saying it now, if activity dips over the next 4 months, then I think we are in for another quiet year.

After hearing all of that, would you think that the average sale price went up or down last month? How about both!

$648,667 is up about 3% from last August, but down .7% from the previous month. Personally, I think that is a shockingly strong number considering how much the average sale price in London usually drops from July to August.

But most shockingly, that is the highest monthly average for August, ever. Including 2022, the “peak” year which by August ($630,832) had already dropped 23% from February ($822,492).

The last thing I want to talk about (not only in this report) is interest rates. We are supposedly looking down the barrel of two more interest rate cuts from the Bank of Canada in 2025 potentially bringing the overnight rate to 2.25% from 2.75%.

Everyone wants to know if this is going to affect the market. It seems that we can’t stop talking about it.

I want to be clear: I don’t believe that this will impact the market at all.

If history tells us anything (history being all of the rate cuts that have happened since the overnight rate was 5% in 2024) the only thing that these rate cuts have done is encourage more people to list their homes.

There have been so many hopeful sellers that think a .25% rate cut is going to bring mass amounts of buyers into the market so they put their house up for sale. If you look at market activity following all of the rate cuts that have happened, it has not impacted sales at all. It has definitely impacted new listings.

I hope that everyone reading this has had a great start to their fall season, whether you had kids returning to school, or you just lost your first week of fantasy football like me. Enjoy the rest of the warm weather, see you in October where we can debate what viral halloween costume I should dress up as.