Ep 31: Guelph Real Estate Market Update | What happened in Jan 2026?

The Guelph real estate report podcast covers the Guelph real estate market, including home prices, neighbourhood trends, buying strategies, selling advice, and local market insights for Guelph, Ontario for the period of January 2026.

In this episode, we break down the current Guelph real estate market for January, 2026 including:

• Average home prices in Guelph

- Number of sales in January and trends in detached and condo markets

• What buyers should do right now

• What sellers need to know in 2026

You can always get touch with Beth and Ryan Waller on their website

Transcript

Guelph real estate sales: what's happening in January 2026:

Summary:

In this episode, Ryan Waller talks about the unusual month of January 2026 in the Guelph real estate market. He notes that the month was unusually slow, with fewer sellers and buyers entering the market compared to previous years. Waller also discusses the low sales numbers for both condominiums and detached homes in Guelph, and the high number of vacant listings (houses that are for sale but no one is living in). He speculates that many sellers are not willing to negotiate In January, there were fewer home sales in the Aldergrove area, but the number was higher than the previous month. Most homes sold for lower than the asking price. The percentage of homes selling for over $1 million was 16%. The market is currently balanced, meaning buyers and sellers can negotiate conditions and prices. Buyers are taking longer to compare and consider houses before making a decision. The full market update can be found on the website or in a video. Contact the business for more

 Transcription

 Welcome to the Guelph Real Estate Report podcast with your host and Guelph realtor, Ryan Waller. This podcast is designed to provide information for those buying and selling homes in the Guelph area to make the process more informative, fun, and a little less stressful. Now on with the show. Hey there and welcome back to another episode of the Guelph Real Estate Report podcast. My name is Ryan Waller and I work in Guelph Real Estate with my wife Beth. 

This is episode number 31, and we are going to talk about the unusual month of January 2026. This month marks my eighth full time year in Guelph real estate, and prior to that I had a lengthy corporate career. But you start to realize in these different types of markets when something unusual is happening, and I think that I can confidently say that January 2026 was a little bit unusual. And we're going to talk a little bit about that today, because it may be indicative of what we could expect throughout the whole year. Maybe this is maybe this is the new market for all I know. Um, but there are some interesting signals that the market was giving us in January. So we're going to start at the top and move back into mid-December, where I think some of this started. Every year in mid-December, you start to see it as about the 15th of December rolls around. People decide that they want to take their house back if they have it on the market. They don't want to get it ready for showings. They just want to be able to do family time or take it easy. And so the cancellations start coming in and it happens every year about mid-December, and they come back in the new year. And naturally, there are a number of listings that get cancelled at the end of the year because the contracts are dated until December 31st and then they expire. And we always expect that they will be back in the new year. Now, not every one of those comes back in the new year, even within our own client base. Some of them cancelled in December and said, I'll come back in the spring, but we do expect a number of people to come back from December onto the market in January, or people who are just waiting for the new year to get things started. 

However, it didn't happen this year and not only did we see a lack of listings or sellers hit the market in early January, but there were no buyers out either. It was almost like everyone had been preoccupied by something else. I don't know, let's think about it. We have some unknown going on in the US. We have unemployment numbers here and not so favorable Canadian economic data. We have the largest group of mortgage renewals at about 60% of Canadian mortgages are coming up for renewal this year, where probably a lot of people are trying to figure out what exactly they're going to do, uh, what their plan is. Uh, we have all sorts of stuff going on. So it was really no surprise, looking back, that people were a little bit hesitant. But, uh, the numbers for January 1st to up until about mid January were just dismal. Uh, the slowest month that we had seen in the past six years was December of 2023, and we were half of that number. And we'll talk about that, uh, how the month ended in just a second. But it just goes to show that. 

Headlines really do impact Canadian real estate and in particular southern Ontario, where we are going through a really different market these days. By the end of January, though, we did improve slightly, although still a very slow month. We averaged 2.4 sales per day in Guelph this January, and for context, the prior three years were all over three per day, and the prior three years to that were all over four per day. So we've hit sort of a new low per day volume in January this year, and at 2.4 sales per day, it actually puts us in one of the slower months in the last number of years as well. Um, equal to December 2022 at 2.4. The only other month that was actually worse was December 2023. That came in at 2.1 sales per day. So we're getting close to the bottom of the barrel in January 2026. Uh, like I said, I mean, it was much worse earlier on in the month, and as the month moved on, it picked up. One interesting thing I took out of January sales numbers were that about a third of the sales made in January were from listings that came to the market in January that were new. They were not relisted from the prior year. And to explain that a little bit further, I that there are buyers that were looking in December. They didn't like what the available options were at the time and many listings cancelled. They came back in January with same price, new price, new pictures, new description, whatever. And buyers still weren't interested. But buyers, a third of them in the market were interested in the new inventory that hit the market in January. And considering we still have been seen now into February, a significant bump up in inventory, we are going to talk about in a few minutes about there are some neighborhoods or even price points that are starting to see a little bit of an uptick because there is buyer demand there waiting for certain things that have yet to come on the market. Okay, a good segue here into inventory levels.

I'm going to give you some numbers here that illustrate the head scratching that we have going on here in the market as to where did these listings go. And just for information, all of this in more detail, if you want to read through it is on our website. We update the same blog and written version that has more detail to it. Uh, on our website, Beth and Ryan. Okay, I think it's on the home page, the link to this, uh, our biweekly market update. But I'm going to take you through some numbers. At the beginning of December, we had 437 houses on the market. At the end of December, we had 347. So that's a net decrease of 90. And now these came from sales in December listing cancellations. Uh, listing expires. But you would anticipate that if 90 came off the market in the month of December, that some of those were sales. Okay, those are gone. Um, but a lot of them are cancel listings. They'll come back and they're going to be some new listings in January. So we would anticipate that we'd probably get closer to the 90 back again in January. Well, here we are at the beginning of February. And the net increase, uh, from the end of the year back until today is 34. So we took 90 off the market in December. We're now only at a net increase of 34. What happened to the rest? They are either still going to come back on the market, but sometime in the future, maybe in the spring, or they have given up selling altogether or some other reason in between. But we did not see the inventory that we thought we were going to see come back on the market in the new year. Now, that being said, we clearly didn't see the buyers either, that we were expecting to get back in the new year. Buyers were in no rush. And if you think about it, if there was no new inventory or little inventory that hit the market and we were just still working with the many of the existing listings we already had, the conclusion, I think, would be that buyers don't want to pay the prices that sellers are asking for their houses, and so unless the sellers are going to come down in price, the buyers aren't moving up in price. And so we get to this stalemate where nobody wants to negotiate and nobody wants to make a deal come together. And so nobody does anything. And I think that's what we saw a lot of in January. It's something that we saw last fall as well. And I think it's going to continue into the spring. It's a very interesting market for sure. Now let's get into the sales numbers for the month. If you take a look at condos, there were 28 condos that sold in the month, and 312,000 was the low price. That was, um, a unit at 281 Bristol. 950 was the high that was in clear fields in the south part of Guelph. And the overall average of the condo market for January was 569,000, which is an improvement. We've been waffling between 600,000 as the high and I think as low as 5.25 as the low, and we are near the low at the end of December and we have now bumped up a little bit to 569. So just, you know, on the higher end again, which is interesting. Um, considering how many units there are, uh, there are 200 and I think there are 201. I'm sorry, there are 199 condos on the market at the moment. Um, and we're selling less than one per day. So we've got 199 days at least of inventory. And, um, it seems to be holding on a little bit. Or it did in January. Anyways, houses sold at an average of 97.5% of the last posted asking price, meaning there was a little bit of negotiation that happened. This is on par with the prior months. Uh, three units actually sold over the asking. Uh, that was, um, the equivalent of 11% three at the asking, of course, 11% again. And the remaining 78% sold under the asking price. And, um. I, you know, I think it's still a segment that's going to struggle throughout the year. Um, have we hit a bottom? I don't think so yet, but it is encouraging, I guess, for sellers to see a little bit of a an improvement in the month. Um, we are selling, as I mentioned, slightly less than one per day, and we are sitting at about 42% vacant listings for sale. So of the total 199, 42% of those are vacant. As in, no one is living there. Someone is paying for it. The mortgage, the condo fees, the utilities, the taxes. But no one is actively living in the house, which you can draw your own conclusions to what that means. But my conclusion is that the seller didn't want to rent it. Uh, maybe because they were planning on selling it, or they don't want to accept lower than a certain price because it wouldn't make financial sense for them. So they're just simply leaving it empty and hoping that the market will improve and as I joke with my kids about hope is not a strategy. And I think until those sellers decide that they want to work with market value, those properties are probably going to continue to sit vacant. Okay. And now on to the detached segment. We had 45 sales here. And of the 45 sales, we had 590,000 as the low price that was in the general hospital area early in the month, and we had 1,000,365 as the high end Cortright West overall average was 858. And much like condos, this was a bump up. Uh, we had actually had a couple of months that were below 800, and we had the high, uh, last spring at about 900. So for January to finish at 858 is, um, I'd say in the middle ground or maybe even slightly higher than the middle. Um. The overall homes are sold at an average of 98.1%. Again, nothing really unusual here. Um, detached homes tend to get a little closer to 100. Than condos do. So. Nothing really, um, noteworthy there. Seven of the 45 sold over the asking. That's 16%. Two sold at the asking and 36 sold under the asking. That's 80% of homes sold under the last listed asking price. One of the things we watch for in this segment is the portion of homes it sell over $1 million, because in golf, for years we had 15 to 20% of homes sell over $1 million at or over a million. And we've been watching this because it's been pretty volatile. Uh, October ended at 17%. So in the range, November was at seven and December was at 13. So we were wondering if maybe January was going to be the third consecutive month out of the band. And it wasn't. January came back into the range at 16%. So, um. Interestingly, you know, I would say there were less sales that happened in January. But of what happened in January, it seemed to be more in line with what we've seen a year ago. Um, which is surprising to me. But I guess the message is buyers were picky, but buyers also were willing to make the move, um, if they found something they liked in January. We're currently sitting in a in a right in the middle of a balanced market. We have about four months inventory and, um, it's good for buyers and sellers in this scenario because buyers have the ability to have, um, conditions in their offers, they can negotiate appropriately, and sellers are in a position where they can negotiate and sales are happening, but that they are not happening in the probably very unhealthy way they were of over the asking without conditions every single time. And so I think sellers need to be aware and accepting of the market because it is a changed market from what your neighbor sold at three years ago. But. Buyers are there. They just are a lot smarter and savvy than they used to be. Um, when looking for houses, they have more tools at their disposal and they have more selection of homes. It's hard to negotiate or to be really looking at comparables or negotiating when there's no supply and you have to pay over the asking. But now that buyers have inventory to choose from, they can take their time and they are taking their sweet time to compare houses, compare features of houses, compare their future lives in a certain house. It's taking them more time to make decisions. But there are buyers out there, and I would anticipate that the sales volume increases as we get into February, March and April. As I mentioned, you can find this whole. Market update on. Sorry about that. We can find our whole market update right on our website. Or you can watch the video version that I'm just about to record. And uh, it's the same sort of information but on a video. Uh, anyways, I hope this find is useful. You can always email us or call us with any questions you may have. Talk to you later.