Only 3 areas near Toronto got more expensive this year

Out of 65 areas the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board tracks, only three cost more than they did a year ago. Every other one is cheaper. One of the three is not even a whole neighbourhood — it is a slice of midtown Toronto.

I pulled these numbers straight from TRREB's August 2026 Market Watch report. Not from a news story about it. The full table is at the bottom of this post so you can check my work.

First, why I am not showing you "the last 30 days"

People ask me which neighbourhood went up last month. I understand why. But a one-month number for a small area is almost meaningless, and I would rather tell you that than sell you a chart.

Here is the problem. A small area might have six sales in a month. If two of those homes happen to have finished basements and big lots, the "average price" jumps. Nothing about the market changed. The mix of houses changed.

So I used two things instead:

• Year over year, not month to month. Twelve months of sales is a big enough pile of data to mean something.
• The MLS Home Price Index, not the average price. The HPI adjusts for the type of home. It compares a typical home to the same typical home a year earlier. That kills the mix problem.

This is the honest version. It is less exciting than "prices exploded in this one pocket." It is also the version that will still be true next month.

The only three areas where prices went up

Look at those last two numbers. Up 0.66% and up 0.18%. That is not a boom. That is flat. Inflation ran higher than that, so in real terms even the "winners" lost a little ground.

Only one area in the entire region — Toronto C10 — beat 1%.

I checked the July report too, as a sanity test. Toronto C10 led that month as well, up 4.35%. Showing up twice in two separate reports is what makes me reasonably confident it is a real trend and not a fluke of which houses happened to sell. It is also cooling: the gain shrank from 4.35% in July to 2.56% in August.

And notice where all three are. Old Toronto. Established, walkable, close to the subway, not much new supply. Nobody is building another Lawrence Park.

The three areas where prices fell the most

King fell the hardest. A typical home there lost about $156,000 of value in twelve months.

The pattern across the whole list is simple: the further you get from the middle of Toronto, and the bigger the house, the more the price fell. Expensive commuter towns got hit hardest. Small condos in the core held up better than big houses in the fields.

What happened right here, around Bradford

This is the part that matters to most people reading this. Bradford did not have a good year.

Bradford fell almost twice as fast as the region as a whole. It was the sixth-worst drop out of 65 areas.

If you bought here in 2025, that is hard reading, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. If you are buying now, keep reading, because the same number works in your favour.

What a 7.73% drop actually does to your mortgage

Percentages are abstract. Here is the same drop in dollars, using a typical Bradford home.

A typical Bradford home is $958,400 today. Working backwards from the 7.73% drop, the same home was about $1,038,700 a year ago.

Based on a 25-year mortgage at 4.24%, the lowest five-year fixed rate on my lender sheet this week, with the minimum down payment and default insurance added to the loan. The qualifying row uses the stress test rate of 6.24%. These are examples, not an offer.

So the same house costs $405 a month less to carry than it did a year ago. Over a five-year term that is about $24,300.

You also need about $8,000 less cash to get in the door. For a lot of first-time buyers, that is the whole difference between waiting another year and not waiting.

What I would actually do with this information

If you are buying: you have more room than you had a year ago, and more choice. Get a real pre-approval before you shop, because the stress test still qualifies you at 6.24%, not at 4.24%. The falling price does not soften that test. It just lowers the number the test is applied to.

If you already own and you are renewing: a lower value on your street does not change your payment. It can change your options. If your mortgage is a big share of what the house is now worth, some lenders get pickier about switching you in. That is worth checking early, not in the last two weeks before renewal.

If you were hoping to refinance and pull cash out: this is the one to look at now. You can generally borrow up to 80% of what the home is worth today, not what it was worth in 2025. If your area dropped 7% or 8%, the amount available to you dropped too.

If you are waiting for prices to fall further: that is a real position and it might be right. Just do the math both ways. Prices fell about 7.7% here this year, but rates also matter. If prices drop another 5% and rates rise a point while you wait, you have not saved anything.

Every area, ranked

Here is the whole list — all 65 areas TRREB published a benchmark for in August 2026, best to worst. Bradford is in bold.

And the regional roll-ups, which are not counted in the 65 above because they contain the areas already listed:

Where these numbers come from

Every figure above is the MLS Home Price Index Composite benchmark from the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board's Market Watch report for August 2026, compared to August 2025. I extracted them from TRREB's published PDF and checked them against TRREB's separate HPI tables for the same month.

Two honest limits on this data:

• This is not all of Ontario. TRREB covers the Greater Toronto Area plus parts of Simcoe and Dufferin counties. Barrie, Ottawa, London and Hamilton report through their own boards and are not in these numbers. For the province as a whole, the benchmark price was $749,800 in July 2026, down 3.9% from a year earlier.
• One area is missing. TRREB did not publish a figure for Toronto C05 in this report, so it is not in my count of 65.

If you want to know what your own place is worth, an index does not do that. It describes a typical home in your area, not your home. But it is the right tool for the question "which way is this going, and how fast."

Want to know what this means for your file?

If you are buying, renewing or thinking about refinancing in Bradford, Innisfil, Newmarket or anywhere in Simcoe County, I compare across dozens of lenders and I will tell you plainly whether the numbers work. There is no cost to ask.

You can also read my Bradford mortgage and home buyer guide for the full breakdown of down payments and closing costs here, or see how I work with Bradford clients.