The REAL Market Report: February 2026

Did Punxsutawney Phil see his shadow a couple of weeks ago? I genuinely don’t know and I don’t actually care much, I heard that he is wrong more often than not anyways.

By the way, I want to point out that as I was typing out the word Punxsutawney, autocorrect only had to add the letter “S” to make my spelling correct, even though I have never written that word before in my life.

While I would have been eliminated from competition in the Scripp’s National Spelling Bee after that missed “S”, I need a bit of a win after I misspelled the word Reykjavik in front of a room of people during a bar trivia I was participating in last weekend. So thank you for indulging me.

It seems beyond clear that winter is over and that spring has sprung in our corner of the world, I don’t see any snow out my window right now, which is great for most people, but bad for me. I still have one prepaid 4 hour lift ticket to use at Boler Mountain before the season ends.

Now that spring is here in a physical sense, will the real estate market follow suit and kick it’s ass into gear? I wonder what that gopher would say. Personally, I’m thinking not.

Before I started writing this, I did a quick google search to see what the major media outlets in our area wrote about last month’s stats. I thought it was pretty funny to see the LFP lean in to the doom and gloom side of things by saying “housing sales are down 20%… but prices haven’t fallen” while CTV London took a more positive stance and said “housing prices remain level… despite sales dropping 20%”.

Welcome to the Spin Zone.

They did both get their numbers correct at least. It doesn’t phase me to see that sales were down 20% year over year, it’s what I have come to expect and wasn’t surprising to see.

Average price pretty level, also not surprising.

Honestly, as I’m putting this all together, I feel like I have been writing the same thing for months.

Average sale price hasn’t changed, much.

Sales are low. Sometimes the lowest they’ve ever been!

New listings are high. Sometimes the highest they’ve ever been!

Active inventory continues to pile up on the market.

Month after month, it’s the same story. The only mystery is this: how low will sales fall and when will this rut end.

Alas, here are the stats:

Average sale price in London last month was $617,461. That number is up from January but down about 3.1% from February of last year. This is the first time that the average sale price has reached over $600k since last September.

Interestingly, the HPI Benchmark price continued to tick up. Overall, that figure increase 0.6% from January which was up from December.

Number of sales last month was 292, down 14.1% from February last year. Keep in mind, I am writing about the London stats exclusively while LFP and CTV London were citing the number for all of LSTAR’s jurisdiction.

292 sales is about 63% of the 10 year average for sales in February. That was the same exact number as January. So if we see about 60% of the 10 year average for this whole year, we are in for 3800-3900 sales in total, which would be abysmal.

There were 8400 sales in London in 2021.

New listings sat at 741 which was much more in line with the 10 year average and was only up 2.3% from last February.

It actually wouldn’t surprise me if we saw fewer listings hit the market compared to last year moving forward. I think anyone who doesn’t have to move is kinda getting the idea that this isn’t the best time to “test the market” and see if you can “get your price”.

Active listings, as a result of fewer sales, did indeed increase in February. There were 1556 homes available for sale at the end of the month in London, up 16.8% from last year and setting a new record high for that figure.

To wrap things up, let me dust off my crystal ball and take a glance into the future. My model predicts about 450 sales for March. I am predicting we see less that 375.

Average sale price should remain between 600-630k for the next several months.

New listings will remain close to the 10 year average for the spring, but because we have low sales, active inventory reaches new heights every month until the end of the year.

See you in April!