In June I wrote about Calgary’s two-speed market, the split between a detached segment that is holding and a condo segment that is not. That post explained the divide. This one is the question I have been asked almost every week since it went up, usually by someone in their late twenties or early thirties, sometimes by an investor with a spreadsheet open: condos are cheap now, should I buy one?
Here is my answer, up front, so you do not have to hunt for it. The discount is real. It is not a bottom. And the thing that will actually protect your money over the next five years is not the price you negotiate. It is the building you choose.
Let me show you why.
The discount is real
Start with the numbers, because the size of the gap between condos and everything else is genuinely unusual.
All of this is from the Calgary Real Estate Board’s August 2026 statistics package, published on September 1, 2026. Put the two ends of the market side by side and the split is hard to miss.
Months of supply is the number I watch, because it tells you who is holding the leverage. Under three months favours the seller, three to four is roughly balanced, and above four favours the buyer. Detached has loosened since I first wrote this, from 2.49 months in June to 3.39 in August, so it has moved from seller-leaning into balanced. Apartments went the other way, from 4.91 to 5.68, sitting 52 days on market and closing at 96.37% of list. The two segments are not converging. They are moving apart.
The part I keep coming back to: in January, CREB forecast that apartment prices would fall 3.5% across 2026, putting the year’s average benchmark near $310,000. Through August the average is running at $299,238, down 8.72% on the same period last year, roughly two and a half times the decline the board expected for the full year. That is not CREB revising its forecast, to be clear. They have not published a revised 2026 condo number. It is simply the actuals overtaking the January projection, which tells you the softness has more force behind it than the forecasters priced in.
August was the third consecutive month with the benchmark below $300,000, and the lowest reading of this cycle. CREB puts the segment’s peak at $341,300 in August 2024, which leaves it about 13.4% below.
Why it is cheap is the whole question
Most of the coverage I have read gets the mechanism backwards, and honestly, so did I when I wrote about the two-speed split in June. I looked harder at the inventory numbers and they say something different.
The obvious assumption is that listings piled up. They did not. Apartment inventory is actually down 4.45% year over year, 1,891 units against 1,979 a year ago. Months of supply blew out to 5.68 not because there is more product, but because sales fell 25.84%. Both halves of that fraction went down. The numerator just went down far less.
That gap has widened since I first wrote this in July. In June it was inventory down 1.75% against sales down 20.34%. The mechanism has not changed, it has intensified.
So this is not a supply glut in the resale market. It is a demand hole. And the demand hole has a cause you can point at.
| Alberta net migration | Q1 2025 | Q1 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Net total | 17,869 | 5,358 |
| Net international | up 11,176 | down 648 |
| Net interprovincial | up 6,693 | up 6,006 |
That is a 70% collapse in net migration into the province in a single year, and it is the single biggest thing that happened to the Calgary condo market. But you have to read the composition, because “Alberta net migration fell 70%” gets repeated in a way that is genuinely misleading.
About three-quarters of that drop is net non-permanent residents, which swung from a net loss of 669 in Q1 2025 to a net loss of 9,993 in Q1 2026 as study permits and work permits expired. Most of the rest is a fall in immigration, from 13,624 to 11,139. Interprovincial migration barely moved, from 6,693 to 6,006, and Alberta remained Canada’s top interprovincial destination for a 15th consecutive quarter (Statistics Canada table 17-10-0020-01). People have not stopped moving here from Ontario and B.C. They are still coming, in roughly the same numbers.
Treat that whole table as preliminary. Q1 2026 is the most recent quarter Statistics Canada has published, the Q2 figures are due later in September, and StatCan has flagged that larger-than-usual revisions to non-permanent resident estimates are coming. That is the line driving most of the swing.
And that composition is not a footnote. It is most of the explanation for the two-speed market.
The cohort that left is the cohort that rents and buys entry-level condos. Students, people on work permits, newcomers in their first Canadian apartment. The cohort that is still arriving, families moving from Toronto and Vancouver with equity, is the cohort buying detached houses in Aspen Woods and Woodbine. That is why one half of the market is down 8.18% and the other half is down 1.09% in the same city in the same month. Two different buyer populations, and only one of them shrank.
The supporting data lines up. Working-age population growth in the Calgary Economic Region, a broader geography than the city itself, slowed to 3.1% in the second quarter of 2026, down from 5.1% a year earlier (City of Calgary, Calgary Housing Review, Q2 2026, published August 11, 2026).
CREB’s chief economist, Ann-Marie Lurie, put the current version of it this way in the September 1 release:
“Meanwhile, we have not seen the same pickup in activity in the lower price ranges, as favourable rental conditions are slowing the transition to ownership.”
The August release is blunter still on the segment itself: “More rental supply is weighing on ownership demand from both first-time buyers and investors, which is slowing sales activity while supply levels remain elevated.” Note what that is describing. Not distress, and not a flood of listings. People who would have bought an entry-level condo are renting instead, because renting got cheaper.
The supply has not landed yet
This is the part I would want to know if I were buying, and it is the reason I will not call this a bottom.
Calgary started 14,821 apartment units in 2025, against a 10-year average of 7,044 (CMHC, Spring 2026 Housing Supply Report). More than double the normal build rate, in one year.
Those units are not all finished. Apartment completions actually fell 10.3% in 2025 while apartment units under construction rose 29.2% (CMHC, Calgary CMA, apartment dwelling type). The wave is still in the air.
I had this wrong in July. I wrote that there were “22,274 apartment units under construction” at the end of Q1 2026. That figure is real and it was a Q1 record, but it is all housing types, not apartments. It sits in the total row of the City’s Housing Under Construction table, and neither 2026 quarterly breaks out an apartment-only figure, though the Q4 2025 report did: 17,207 apartment units, 73.3% of the total. The Q2 2026 number, published August 11, is 22,805 units under construction, still across all types and down 312 from a year earlier. CREB’s 2026 forecast puts roughly 26,000 units under construction completing over the next few years.
The apartment-specific figures above (the 14,821 starts, the 10.3% and the 29.2%) are CMHC’s, and those really are apartments.
Every one of those units gets finished whether or not migration recovers. They do not care about the forecast. They arrive.
So: the pressure is ahead of us, not behind us. Nobody can honestly call this a bottom, including me. Anyone who tells you they have called it is guessing, and they are guessing with your down payment.
That does not mean do not buy. It means buy for reasons that survive another soft year.
If you are a first-time buyer
This is the group I am most comfortable telling to look seriously.
You have leverage you have not had in years. Fifty-two days on market means you can see a unit twice, sleep on it, and go back with questions. A 96.37% sale-to-list ratio means the list price is a starting point again. Conditions on financing and inspection get respected instead of stripped out to win. If you were shopping in 2022 and got run over in three bidding wars, this is a different world.
And Alberta stacks the entry costs in your favour in a way most people moving here do not appreciate until they see the closing statement.
Alberta charges no percentage-of-price land transfer tax. What you pay instead is a registration fee: a small flat amount plus $5 for every $5,000, which works out near a tenth of a percent. On a $295,400 condo at 5% down, that is a Transfer of Land charge of $50 plus $5 per $5,000 of value ($350) and a mortgage registration charge of $50 plus $5 per $5,000 of principal ($345 on the financed amount). Roughly $695, all in. The statute reads “$5 for each $5,000 or portion thereof”, so each increment rounds up rather than to the nearest. These amounts have been in force since October 20, 2024. The fee schedule was reissued May 1, 2026 with both lines unchanged. The same purchase in Ontario or B.C. would cost you thousands.
There is no provincial sales tax on the CMHC premium here either. Ontario, Quebec and Saskatchewan charge it. Alberta does not.
And the minimum down payment on the benchmark is 5%, or $14,770. The CMHC premium at a down payment between 5% and 9.99% is 4.00% of the loan, and it is normally rolled into the mortgage rather than paid in cash. One correction from the July version: I quoted a 0.20% surcharge for amortizing past 25 years as though it applied here. It does not, because this example runs a 25-year amortization. It is real if you stretch to 30 years, though: CMHC prices a 30-year insured purchase through its Home Start programme at 4.20% rather than 4.00% at this down payment, and Sagen states the same 0.20% as an explicit surcharge.
Run it out. With 5% down on the $295,400 benchmark, your loan is $280,630, the 4.00% CMHC premium adds about $11,225, and you finance roughly $291,855. At a 4.09% five-year fixed on a 25-year amortization (the best insured five-year fixed on Ratehub’s Alberta table on September 1, 2026), principal and interest come to about $1,549 a month. Add the median Calgary condo fee of $550, about $164 a month in property tax and about $40 in insurance, and you are near $2,303 a month all in.
Two things in that paragraph are worth pausing on, because they moved in opposite directions since July and mostly cancelled out. The benchmark fell about $3,600, and the best insured five-year fixed rose from 3.94% to 4.09%. Net effect on the payment: five dollars a month. If you have been waiting for prices to fall before buying, that is what waiting has actually bought you this summer.
Property tax is the one that surprised me. I had $155 a month in the July version, which was Calgary’s 2025 rate. The 2026 residential rate is 0.0066499 of assessed value, and almost the whole increase is provincial: the education portion rose about 19.5% year over year while the municipal portion moved 0.5%. On $295,400 that is $1,964 a year, or $164 a month. One caution on that arithmetic: I am using the benchmark price as a stand-in for an assessment, and they are not the same thing. Your assessment is the City’s estimate of market value as of July 1 of the previous year, using the property’s condition as of that December 31, set by mass appraisal. Use your own assessment notice when you run this for real.
The honest math if you are buying to rent
I will not dress this up, because I have watched people lose money on it.
If you are buying a Calgary condo as a rental in 2026, you are being squeezed from both ends. Prices are down, which is the part everyone sees. But rents are down more, and vacancy is climbing, which is the part the spreadsheet usually leaves out.
According to the rentals.ca and Urbanation National Rent Report published in August 2026 using July data, Calgary’s average condo and apartment asking rent was $1,828, down 4.5% year over year and down 13.4% from the July 2024 peak. One-bedroom units averaged $1,616 and two-bedrooms $1,997. Calgary is now tied with Vancouver, both at -4.5%, for the largest annual decline among Canada’s six largest rental markets. Nationally, that same report has condo rents falling faster than purpose-built rentals, down 6.3% against down 2.6%, which means a condo investor is sitting in the worse-performing half of the rental market.
In the July version of this post I set that against the City of Calgary’s own housing page, which then showed multi-residential rents up 3.8%, and I used the disagreement as a reason for caution. That counterpoint is gone. The City’s current reading, Q2 2026 against Q2 2025 using RentFaster data, is multi-residential down 9.6%. Both sources now say the same thing.
What the City’s data does add is where the decline is not happening. Over the same period detached rents were up 16.5% and townhouse or duplex rents up 1.0%, while multi-residential fell 9.6% and basement or main-floor suites fell 8.0%. The City calls it “an increasingly segmented rental market”, which is the rental-side echo of the two-speed pattern in the sale market. I would not build a plan on that detached figure, it moves a lot on a small sample, but the direction holds across the categories: the pressure is on small units, not houses.
Both of those are asking-rent series taken from available listings, which is a different thing from the occupied rents CMHC surveys. So this is what landlords are asking on new listings, not what everyone in Calgary is currently paying.
Vacancy is going the same direction. CMHC’s Rental Market Report, published December 11, 2025 on its October 2025 survey, put Calgary purpose-built apartment vacancy at 5.0%, and its July 2026 outlook update projects 5.9% in 2026 and 6.2% in 2027. (I had 5.7% for 2026 in the July version. CMHC revised it up on July 22.)
What matters more to a condo investor than the headline is underneath it. The highest rent quartile sits at 6.7% vacancy, and CMHC describes that higher-end market as one that “often competes with the condominium apartment market.” That is precisely the pool your nice condo swims in. 6.7% is down from 9.1% a year earlier, though, so that end of the market is tightening, not loosening.
Vacancy in Calgary’s rental condominium stock specifically was 2.2% in October 2025, against 5.0% for purpose-built. Condos are not sitting empty. They are competing on price, which is a different problem and shows up in your rent, not your vacancy. Read the trend as well as the level, though: 2.2% is up from 1.3% a year earlier, so condo vacancy nearly doubled off a very low base.
Now the math. This is the benchmark apartment, financed as a rental. Remember that you cannot use CMHC insurance on a property you do not live in, so 20% down is the floor, not an option.
| Line | Best rental rate | Typical rental rate |
|---|---|---|
| Purchase price (August 2026 apartment benchmark) | $295,400 | $295,400 |
| Down payment (20%, the minimum on a rental) | $59,080 | $59,080 |
| Mortgage | $236,320 | $236,320 |
| Five-year fixed, 25-year amortization | 4.54% | 4.79% |
| Principal and interest | approx. $1,313 / month | approx. $1,346 / month |
| Condo fee (Calgary median, live MLS data) | $550 / month | $550 / month |
| Property tax (2026 City rate) | approx. $164 / month | approx. $164 / month |
| Insurance (approximate) | approx. $40 / month | approx. $40 / month |
| Total carrying cost | approx. $2,067 / month | approx. $2,100 / month |
| Two-bedroom average asking rent, and falling | $1,997 / month | $1,997 / month |
| Monthly shortfall | -$70 | -$103 |
A word on those two rates, because there is no single right one. The best insured five-year fixed on September 1 was 4.09%, but you cannot have it: CMHC does not insure a single-unit property you are not living in, so a typical Calgary rental condo is uninsurable by definition and prices above owner-occupied. The 4.54% column is the lowest Alberta rental five-year fixed I could source on September 1, from Ratehub with occupancy set to rental. There are lower rental rates advertised nationally, but the ones I found were from brokers who do not lend here, and a rate you cannot get is not a floor. The 4.79% column applies ATB’s own published rental surcharge of 0.50% to its conventional client rate, which is the only Alberta lender premium I found stated in writing. I have shown both instead of picking one, because quoting only the best rate flatters this deal and quoting only the worst overstates my case. Use your own quote when you run it for real.
You are negative before a single vacancy, a single repair, or a single dollar of property management. Not negative after something goes wrong. Negative on the day everything goes right, with a tenant in place, paying the average asking rent, in a market where the average asking rent is falling.
The shortfall narrowed since July. It was about $83 a month when I first ran this. At the better of the two rates above it is now $70. Prices came down, rental mortgage rates held about where they were, and rent was roughly flat. The narrowing is the price fall, not the financing. If the trend continued, this deal would eventually cross into positive. But “eventually breaks even at the best rate available anywhere, before any vacancy or repair” is not an investment thesis. It is a description of a deal that does not work yet.
Buy the building, not the unit
Everything above is about the market. This part is about the only variable you actually control, and it is where I would spend all of your leverage.
Alberta’s reserve fund rules are weaker than most buyers assume. A condo corporation must redo the cycle within five years of the day its last reserve fund plan was approved, which in practice can run longer than five years since the last study, and there is no statutory penalty for under-funding the reserve. The 2026 amendments did not change that. Which means the diligence sits with you, the buyer, and nobody is coming to do it for you.
There is a new risk most buyers have never heard of. Since February 2026 an Alberta condo corporation can recover its insurance deductible from an owner without filing an insurance claim at all. Under section 62.4 of the Condominium Property Regulation you are absolutely liable on demand, up to a ceiling of $50,000, for damage that originates in or from your unit, and that liability applies whatever your bylaws say. The $50,000 ceiling itself is not new, it has been in the regulation since January 2020. What changed this year is that the corporation no longer has to make a claim first.
There is a separate and broader chargeback power under section 39.01 of the Act. That one does require enabling bylaws, carries no dollar cap beyond the policy’s own deductible, and comes with a process: notice within 90 days of when the board knew or ought to have known, a written response window of at least 10 days, a board resolution, and a 30-day right of appeal to the Court of King’s Bench. Estoppel certificates now have to disclose a proposed chargeback once notice has been served. Ask about both.
The regulation does give you defences. You are not liable where the damage came from a construction defect, from an act or omission of the corporation or its board, officers, employees or agents, or from normal structural deterioration of common property.
A note on dates, because the sources disagree. The Act amendments were proclaimed in force February 15, 2026, and Service Alberta publishes February 26 for the regulation. The government’s own plain-language condominium page merges these two regimes into a single rule, which is where I got this wrong in July. It is reliable for dates and intent and unreliable for the operative rule.
Insurance is the pressure behind all of this. Alberta homeowners’ home and mortgage insurance has risen faster than in any other province, up 55.8% between December 2020 and December 2025 against a national average of 38.6% (Statistics Canada, released June 16, 2026). That is the Statistics Canada CPI series by that name, not condo corporation master policies, so I will not pretend it is a master-policy number. Worth noting the study’s own caveat too: it calls the five-year increase not unusually large, and Alberta’s earlier five-year windows ran higher. But condo corporations buy insurance in the same Alberta market under the same hail, wind and water pressure, and they are feeling it in the same direction. Rising deductibles and rising master premiums are what a board is quietly absorbing before it shows up in your fee.
And here is the finding I did not expect. I pulled the condo fees on every active Calgary apartment listing on the MLS on September 1, 2026, 1,766 listings, of which 1,752 carried enough detail to use. The median is $550 a month, or $0.70 per square foot, on a median unit of 811 square feet. That is almost exactly where it sat seven weeks earlier ($554 and $0.70 across 1,933 listings), so what follows is not a one-week artefact. Split it by building age:
| Building era | Listings | Median fee | Median size | Median fee per sq ft |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-1990 | 348 | $613 | 793 sq ft | $0.80 |
| 1990-1999 | 102 | $655 | 991 sq ft | $0.67 |
| 2000-2009 | 398 | $599 | 845 sq ft | $0.74 |
| 2010-2019 | 558 | $519 | 772 sq ft | $0.71 |
| 2020 and newer | 346 | $387 | 766 sq ft | $0.53 |
New buildings look cheaper. Of course they do. Nothing has broken yet.
Two caveats on that table, since last time I showed only the endpoints. It is not a clean slope: the 1990s cohort comes in at $0.67, below both the decade before it and the two after. And the reason is floor area rather than thrift, because that cohort has the highest median fee in the table at $655 and the largest median unit at 991 square feet. A big fee spread over a big unit reads as cheap per foot. Comparing fees per square foot across eras is partly comparing unit sizes.
Each column is a median in its own right, so the per-foot figure is not the fee column divided by the size column. It is the median of the fee per foot of every individual listing, which is the right way to compute it and the reason the three columns do not multiply out.
The endpoints still say what they said. The oldest stock charges about 51% more per square foot than the newest.
A young reserve fund with no repair history and a roof that has never been replaced can absolutely support a low fee, right up until the first real capital cycle arrives and the board discovers what the study should have told them. A cheap condo fee is not evidence of a healthy building. Sometimes it is evidence that nobody has had to pay for anything yet. The most expensive condo I have ever seen someone buy had one of the lowest fees on the list.
One more thing worth knowing before you get your hopes up: the new mandatory technical analysis (a professional engineer or registered architect assessing the building envelope and structural components within four years of first occupancy) applies only to buildings first occupied on or after February 26, 2026. It does nothing for a resale buyer today. If you are shopping the existing stock, that protection is not yours.
The questions I would ask before writing an offer
This is the checklist. If a listing agent cannot answer these, or the documents do not, that is your answer.
- What does the reserve fund study actually say, and when was it done? Not “is there one.” What does it say, and how old is it.
- What is the reserve fund balance against what the plan says the balance should be? The gap between those two numbers is the number.
- What is in the last 12 months of board minutes? This is where the trouble lives before it becomes a levy. Read all of them.
- What is the deductible on the master insurance policy? See above. You can be on the hook for up to $50,000 of it whatever the bylaws say, and for more than that if the bylaws permit a chargeback.
- Has a special assessment been levied, and is one being discussed? Both halves of that question matter.
- What percentage of the building is investor-owned and rented? A heavily rented building in a falling-rent market is a building with owners under pressure.
- What is under construction within a few blocks, and when does it complete? You are not just competing with today’s supply. You are competing with the crane you can see from the balcony.
I go through the full document review in detail in what to check in Calgary condo documents. If you take one thing from this post into a showing, take that list.
So, should you buy?
If you are a first-time buyer, you want to live in it, the payment works, and you can honestly see yourself there past 2031: yes, and you will have more room to do it carefully than you have had in five years, as long as you buy the building carefully.
If you are buying it to rent out and the mortgage has to be carried by the rent: no. The math does not work, and it is not close.
And if you are somewhere in between, the answer is not in the price. It is in the reserve fund, the minutes, the master policy and the crane down the street.
Common questions
Are Calgary condo prices going to keep falling?
Nobody knows, and anyone who tells you they do is selling you something. What I can tell you is what the pipeline says. Calgary had 22,805 housing units of all types under construction at the end of the second quarter of 2026, and CREB notes roughly 26,000 units under construction will complete over the next few years. That supply arrives whether or not demand recovers, so the pressure is still ahead of us. CREB’s directional read is that the supply pressure eases by the end of 2026 and into 2027. There is no credible numeric forecast for 2027 condo prices, and I am not going to invent one.
How much do I need to buy a $295,400 condo in Calgary?
The minimum down payment on the $295,400 apartment benchmark is 5%, or $14,770. Alberta charges no percentage-of-price land transfer tax, only a flat registration levy. At 5% down, once the 4.00% CMHC premium is financed into the mortgage, registration comes to roughly $695 on that purchase: a $350 Transfer of Land charge plus about $345 in mortgage registration. On top of the down payment, budget for a lawyer, a home inspection and a condo document review, which together typically run a few thousand dollars. The CMHC premium is 4.00% of the loan at a down payment between 5% and 9.99% on a 25-year amortization, it is normally added to your mortgage rather than paid in cash, and Alberta charges no provincial sales tax on it.
Can I buy a rental condo in Calgary with 5% down?
No. CMHC does not insure a single-unit property you are not living in, so a pure rental purchase requires a minimum 20% down payment. On the $295,400 benchmark that is $59,080 in cash before you have paid a lawyer or an inspector. The 5% minimum applies only to a home you occupy. It also means a rental is uninsurable by definition, which is why rental financing prices above owner-occupied.
Is it cheaper to rent or to buy a condo in Calgary right now?
On a pure month-to-month basis, renting is currently cheaper in this segment. Carrying the $295,400 benchmark condo with 5% down at a 4.09% five-year fixed on a 25-year amortization works out to roughly $2,303 a month once you add the median condo fee, property tax and insurance. The average asking rent for a two-bedroom condo or apartment in Calgary was $1,997 in July 2026 according to rentals.ca and Urbanation. Buying wins over a long horizon through principal paydown and control of where you live, not because it beats rent this month. Rates and rents both move, so treat these as September 2026 figures.
What is the biggest mistake condo buyers are making in this market?
Shopping on price and condo fee alone. A low monthly fee feels like a win, and in newer Calgary buildings the fees genuinely are lower per square foot, $0.53 against $0.80 in pre-1990 stock. But a young building with a young reserve fund and no repair history has not been tested yet, and a fee that looks cheap today can be followed by a special assessment tomorrow. The discount in this market is real, but the thing that protects you is the financial health of the corporation you are buying into, not the price you negotiated off the list.
Thinking about a Calgary condo?
Send me the building and I will tell you honestly what I see in it, reserve fund and all, before you write anything.
