More Ontario Homes Are Selling Under $500,000 Again, and Condos Are Leading the Way

Homes valued under $500,000 are carving out a bigger slice of Ontario's real estate market, according to new data from the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC), offering a modest bright spot for buyers who have spent years watching affordability slip further out of reach.

MPAC's latest figures show homes priced below $500,000 now make up nearly 24 per cent of Ontario's housing market, up from just 17 per cent in 2022. Greg Martino, the organization's chief assessor and data officer, described the shift as a rebalancing in the housing market following years of runaway price growth.

Still, the improvement comes with an important caveat: even at nearly a quarter of the market, homes in that price range remain far scarcer than a decade ago, when they accounted for 67 per cent of all Ontario properties. Meanwhile, the share of homes valued above $1 million has fallen from a 2022 peak of 35 per cent to about a quarter today.

The rebound in affordability is being driven almost entirely by the condo segment. Forty-six per cent of condos were valued under $500,000 in 2026, nearly double the 24 per cent recorded just four years earlier. Other housing types have seen far more modest movement: only five per cent of townhouses, 15 per cent of semi-detached homes and 18 per cent of detached homes now fall under that threshold, all sharply down from the shares recorded a decade ago.

The shift is also reshaping which communities count as affordable. Between 2022 and 2026, the number of Ontario municipalities with a median home value above $750,000 dropped from 105 to 65. Several communities just outside the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, including Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge, Hamilton, Collingwood, Kawartha Lakes, Gravenhurst and Brock, have moved from being majority-priced above that threshold to majority below it.

For buyers who have felt priced out of the Toronto market entirely, MPAC suggested these shifts could meaningfully widen the range of communities within financial reach, even if the broader affordability picture in Ontario remains far from resolved.