What a CIBC Economist Told a Toronto Conference About Canada's Housing Future

As of October 2024, the message I took away from Benjamin Tal, deputy chief economist at CIBC, is simple. The Bank of Canada's 2024 rate cuts will pull buyers back into Canadian housing. Houses were holding their ground in late 2024, and the frozen condo market should revive from roughly early 2026. The year from late 2024 on is the window.

I am Moe Asgarian, a Toronto broker with RE/MAX, and I was at the RE/MAX Activate conference with my colleagues from Team Asgarian when it ran in Toronto from September 17 to 19, 2024. Tal's session was the one that changed how I picture the next two years, so here is what he said and what I think it means for people buying and selling here.

Inside the September 2024 RE/MAX Activate conference in Toronto

RE/MAX Activate is the company's annual Canadian conference, and the 2024 edition ran in Toronto from September 17 to 19. It mixes training, networking and a few serious keynotes, and the organisers push hard for speakers to stay on the live questions in housing and in the Canadian economy, so that agents hear the newest thinking first. It struck me as one of the better RE/MAX Canada conferences I have attended.

One smaller point from another speaker stayed with me as well. Plenty of agents compete by handing out bigger and bigger discounts, and his argument was that they should invest in themselves instead: attend the conferences, sit in the classes, learn the pricing. An agent who genuinely knows what a pocket of the city is worth can buy well enough to earn a client several times what any discount was worth. I agree with that, and it is a fair description of why I was in the room.

Rate cuts that should have started a year earlier

Tal walked through what higher interest rates had done to the Canadian economy over the previous few years, and he spent most of that stretch on inflation: how much more expensive ordinary life had become. By September 2024 the Bank of Canada had begun lowering its policy rate, and his verdict on the timing was blunt. That turn should have happened in 2023. Late or not, he was optimistic that falling rates would push Canadian housing into a busier phase.

Immigration delayed a recession and strained the job market

The part of his talk I keep returning to was his account of how Canada avoided a visible recession. He said that by 2024 the country had offset it temporarily with population growth: roughly 1.2 million people arriving over a short period up to 2024, which lifted population growth to somewhere between 3 and 3.5 percent in those years, against the under one percent that is normal for a developed country. As of 2024, in his reading, that growth was propping up the headline economic numbers.

The other side of it was a labour market under real strain. He pointed out how large a share of those arrivals were students and people without permanent residency, and described the whole mix as an unhelpful one for the economy. I have written before about how immigration policy feeds through into Canadian housing, and his numbers matched what I see in rental demand across Toronto.

Houses are holding up, condos are frozen until early 2026

On the split between houses and condos, his reading as of September 2024 was that buying and selling houses was in reasonably good shape while the condo market was not interesting at all. Investors were losing money in those months, and buyers who wanted a condo to live in had shown little appetite for several months running.

His forecast was the headline for me. After about a year and a bit, so from roughly the start of 2026, he expects the condo market to find a strong footing again. If you intend to buy, he said, the stretch from late 2024 through the following year is your time. He was careful to add that this is not a licence to rush at any condo at any price. The argument was that rate cuts do their work, conditions for buying a condo become good enough, and the market that sits frozen in 2024 warms up.

Why the US economy decides how fast Canada can cut

Tal also spent time on the United States. A Trump win, he said, would reach Canada in specific ways, among them a wider budget deficit and higher tariffs. His broader point is the one worth keeping: the Canadian economy and the Bank of Canada's decisions are heavily shaped by what happens south of the border. His forecast as of September 2024 was that a deteriorating American picture would let Canada cut rates with more confidence. He added that technology has wiped out a great many American jobs, a trend running through these years that has little to do with Biden or Trump.

Advice for Toronto condo and house buyers in late 2024

Here is my own read, in October 2024. If you are buying a condo for the long run, a frozen market with motivated sellers and thin competition is where the better purchases get made, and you have the rare luxury of time to be picky. If you are selling a condo in Toronto, price it for the market as it stands in late 2024, not for the figure you had in your head when investors were still competing for units. And if you are buying a house, go in knowing you are competing in the healthier half of this market, so your offer strategy has to be sharper.

If you want a second set of eyes on your numbers, fill out the form at the bottom of this page or book a free consultation, and we will go through them together. Stay well and take care.