Home sales flat in March
Spring brings more listings but prices and sales were weak
The housing market in Trent Hills picked up a little bit in March as hints of spring led to 56 new listings, resulting in 110 homes being for sale at the end of the month.
But the continuing weakness is shown in actual sales and prices. Last month, 10 homes sold for a median price of $555,000, according to the Central Lakes Association of Realtors. The number of sales was up one from February, but the median price was down $10,000 or about 2 per cent.
In comparison, 17 homes sold in March 2025 with a median price of $620,000, so sales were down 70 per cent and prices 10 per cent this year.
In all of Northumberland County, 102 homes sold with a median price of $620,000 as 328 homes came on the market. In February, 71 homes sold with a median price of $635,000.
Economist Mike Moffatt highlights the dilemma of our current situation. “Resale prices have fallen while construction costs haven’t, leaving us in a perverse equilibrium where homes are still too expensive to buy but not profitable enough to build,” he wrote on his website Missing Middle Initiative.
Moffatt calculates that “an HST rebate on new homes and reductions in development charges could cut new-home prices in Ontario by 10–20%.”
For example, he says this should cut the price of a townhouse in Oshawa from $730,000 to about $615,000. “This is a good first step, but not a solution. Even at $615,000, many middle-class families are still priced out, and without deeper structural reform to taxes like development charges, governments will continue to treat new homebuyers as a revenue source rather than a policy priority.”
“The decision to remove the 13 per cent HST on new homes for a wider range of buyers is a smart and responsible step by the government that reflects the realities of today’s housing market,” said Wendy Giroux, CEO of the Central Lakes Association of Realtors. “We applaud this move—lowering upfront costs will make homeownership more attainable.”
The recent changes by Ottawa and Queen’s Park are an effort to halt or reverse the current sales and price declines. Just before they were announced, TD Economics sharply lowered its 2026 forecast for home sales and prices, saying it no longer expects either to rise this year after weak performance over the past two quarters.
In December, it had projected a 0.6 per cent increase in home prices in Ontario, but last month cut that to a 4 per cent decline.
Let's be clear about one thing: "reductions in development charges" means putting the cost—and thus the tax burden of building infrastructure for new development—on the backs of everyone who pays municipal property taxes either directly or indirectly.
Moffat conveniently doesn't quantify "not profitable enough to build." If developers want to put forward their audited financial statements and let us know just how much profit they make on their projects, then it would be a balanced discussion, but to me this sounds very much like a private sector toady making the same biased arguments that always suggest the way forward is lower taxes for people who have already accumulated lots of capital at the detriment of the middle class, or what's left of it.