We are a brokerage. We get paid when someone buys a home. That is the exact reason we are not going to tell you whether now is a good time to buy one.
Almost every page you will find answering this question was written by someone with the same financial interest, and almost all of them answer yes. Some of them answer yes in every market condition, which is a reasonable clue about how the answer was arrived at.
There is a better reason than conflict of interest, though. The question is not answerable. Nobody knows where Calgary prices go next, and the recent record is unusually clear about what confident predictions were worth.
The evidence that timing advice fails
Calgary apartment prices peaked in August 2024, at a benchmark of $341,300. In August 2026 the apartment benchmark was $295,400, roughly thirteen per cent below that peak.
Every page that told a buyer in the summer of 2024 that it was a good time to buy an apartment in Calgary was confidently, specifically wrong, and the buyer who believed it is out roughly forty-six thousand dollars on price alone, before any of the costs of buying and selling. Those pages are mostly still online. Very few of them have been corrected.
This is not an argument that prices will keep falling. That would be the same mistake in the other direction. It is an argument that the genre is unreliable, including when it agrees with you.
What can actually be known
Market conditions can be measured. What they will do next cannot. Here is the measurement, as of August 2026, with no extrapolation attached.
Supply and activity
Calgary recorded 1,660 sales in August 2026, down about sixteen per cent from the year before. New listings were 3,141, down nearly ten per cent. Inventory stood at 6,509 units, which works out to roughly four months of supply overall.
That headline hides a real split. Apartments carried nearly six months of supply. Detached carried just over three. Those are close to different markets.
Prices by type
| Type | Benchmark | Change over one year |
|---|---|---|
| Total residential | $569,800 | Down about 1% |
| Detached | $744,300 | Down about 1% |
| Semi-detached | $690,500 | Up about 1% |
| Row | $415,200 | Down about 5% |
| Apartment | $295,400 | Down about 8% |
Homes priced over one million dollars recorded gains over the previous year, driven by detached and semi-detached properties. The board's own chief economist attributed that to improved supply choice and to longer-term confidence among buyers who are not shying away from the available supply.
The towns
Airdrie's total residential benchmark was $508,800, down over four per cent year over year. Okotoks was $608,400, down nearly two per cent, in a town that has struggled with lower-than-average supply since 2021. Cochrane's year-to-date sales were up over five per cent. Chestermere is the outlier: its sales-to-new-listings ratio dropped below thirty per cent and months of supply reached nine.
What the board itself says about the bottom of the market
This is the part worth reading twice, because of who said it. Explaining why activity in the lower price ranges had not picked up, the board's chief economist pointed to rental conditions: favourable rental conditions, in her words, are slowing the transition to ownership.
That is a real estate board saying that renting is currently competitive enough to keep people renting. The rental data agrees. Calgary's purpose-built vacancy rate was five per cent, the average two-bedroom rent was $1,914 with a change not statistically different from zero, and the average rent paid by new tenants taking over a unit actually fell, to $1,836 from $1,927 the year before, after purpose-built rental supply grew eleven per cent in a single year.
We work that comparison properly in the rent versus buy guide, including the cases where renting is the better decision.
What more supply means for you
Here is the one inference we will draw, because it is about conditions rather than the future.
Four months of supply means choice, and choice means time. You can see a property twice. You can take the weekend. You can make an offer with conditions and expect it to be considered. You can walk away from something that is nearly right and reasonably expect to find another.
That is a description of the present, not a claim about next spring. If supply tightens, that changes. But nobody should be telling you to hurry in a market that currently carries six thousand five hundred listings.
The question underneath the question
When people ask whether now is a good time to buy, they usually mean something more personal: am I about to make a mistake. That question is answerable, and it has nothing to do with the market.
Six questions that actually decide it
- How long will you stay? Under about three years, transaction costs dominate everything else and renting usually wins. This is the single most decisive variable and it has no relationship to market conditions at all.
- Is your income stable, and likely to stay that way? A mortgage is a long commitment tested by a lender once, at the start, on a snapshot.
- Do you have the down payment without emptying everything? Reaching the down payment by draining every account is how a manageable purchase becomes a fragile one.
- What is left afterwards? Aim to still hold several months of housing costs plus something for repairs after closing. Furnaces, roofs and condominium special assessments do not schedule themselves around your cash position.
- Does the payment fit with room to spare? The standard guidelines put housing costs at about thirty-nine per cent of gross income and total debt at forty-four. Those are ceilings. Living at the ceiling means any surprise becomes a crisis. Our affordability guide works this properly.
- Have you found something you actually want? The worst purchases we see are not badly timed. They are made by people who decided to buy, then found something, rather than finding something worth buying.
If the answer to all six is yes, the market conditions are close to irrelevant. If the answer to two or three is no, a favourable market will not rescue the purchase.
What we will say
We will tell you what the data shows and where it is uncertain. We will tell you if a specific property looks overpriced against comparable sales. We will tell you if we think you are stretching, which is a conversation brokerages are not famous for starting.
We will not tell you that prices are about to rise, that this is a window, or that you should move quickly. If someone does tell you that, ask them what they said in August 2024, and whether it is still on their website.
When you are ready to test the money side rather than the mood, start with the pre-approval guide. It answers a question that has an actual answer.