Calgary • Airdrie • Market
Calgary & Airdrie Real Estate Market
Monthly numbers go stale in weeks. How to read them does not. This page explains what the figures in every market report actually mean — and links to the current month’s.
Start Here
Most Market Reports Are Written To Impress You.
Every month CREB® publishes the numbers, and every agent in the city reposts them with a headline attached. “Prices up!” “Balanced market!” “Buyer’s market returns!” Often the same month’s data supports all three, depending on which figure you lead with and which property type you mean.
So rather than hand you another headline, here is what each number actually measures, what it hides, and the one thing none of them can tell you about your own home.
The Four Numbers
What Each One Actually Means.
Benchmark price — not average price
The benchmark is the price of a typical home in a given category: same size, age and condition, tracked month to month. It is the more useful figure, because it strips out the distortion you get when a handful of expensive homes sell in one month.
Average price does the opposite. Three estate sales in a quiet month can push the average up while nothing about the market has actually changed. If a report quotes averages and not benchmarks, ask why.
Months of supply
How long it would take to sell everything currently listed at the current pace of sales. Under roughly two months favours sellers; four or more favours buyers; in between is what people call balanced.
The trap is that it is a citywide average across all property types. Apartments and detached homes routinely sit in completely different markets in the same month, in the same city.
New listings versus sales
The direction of travel. When new listings consistently outpace sales, inventory builds and pricing power shifts toward buyers — usually a month or two before headline prices reflect it.
This is the number worth watching if you are deciding whether to list now or wait, because it moves first.
Days on market
Almost always measured to a firm sale, not to the first offer. A home can draw competing offers in week one and still show three or four weeks on market if the accepted offer carried a longer condition period.
We have that exact gap in our own record: a seller who remembers offers arriving within six days on a home the MLS® recorded at 24. Both true, measuring different things. Worth remembering before you judge any agent, or any listing, on that figure alone.
The Limit
None Of It Tells You What Your Home Will Do.
City-level data describes a city. You are selling one house, on one street, at one size, in one month — and the variation underneath the citywide figure is much larger than the figure itself moves.
Our own record makes the point. In Coopers Crossing we have sold 47+ homes, and the time on market ranges from 3 days to 150, with a median of 28. In a single year, 2018, our listings in that one community took 35, 35, 51, 77, 130 and 150 days. No market report would have predicted which was which.
Which is why the honest answer to “how’s the market?” is a question back: which community, which property type, and what are you trying to do? The monthly numbers are context. They are not an answer.
This Month’s Numbers
The Monthly Updates.
We publish the CREB® figures for Calgary, Airdrie, Cochrane and Okotoks each month, with what we think they mean rather than just the headline.
- Is Calgary still a seller’s market?May 2026 update
- A shift toward balanceJanuary 2026 update
- Why sales slowed while showings stayed highMarket analysis
- Rising supply, but not evenly across price pointsMarket analysis
- Inventory at pre-pandemic highsJuly 2025 update
Older updates stay published rather than being quietly deleted — you can read back through them and see whether what we said at the time held up.
So — How’s Your Market?
Tell us your community, your property type and what you are trying to do, and we will tell you what has actually been happening there. Including when the answer is that this is not your moment.