If you've been watching downtown Victoria or Vic West listings this fall, you've probably seen the same headline everyone else has: sales jumped in August, the busiest month for the region in five years. It reads like the market has turned a corner. Then you open the actual listings for a one-bedroom near Yates Street or Store Street, and the prices look almost identical to what they were in the spring. Some are lower.
Both things are true at once, and understanding why matters more than the headline itself if you're trying to decide whether now is the right time to buy a condo in Victoria's core.
The Headline Says Momentum. The Ledger Says Something Narrower.
The Victoria Real Estate Board reported 591 properties sold across the region in August 2026, up 12.6 percent from the 525 sold in August 2025. Board chair Fergus Kyne called it a market with "steady momentum," adding that sales activity was stronger than it had been in five years while inventory remained at what he described as healthy levels.
That's accurate as far as it goes. But the gain wasn't spread evenly. Single-family home sales rose 15.3 percent year over year to 309 units. Condominium sales rose even more, 15.1 percent, to 175 units. On paper, condos look like the strongest story in the release.
Here's where the headline stops telling the whole story. The MLS® Home Price Index benchmark for a condominium in the Victoria Core rose 0.9 percent over that same twelve months, from $548,900 to $553,600. That sounds like modest, steady appreciation. But the median price for a condo sold in August fell about 2.7 percent year over year. More units changed hands. The typical price paid for one of them went down, not up.
Two Numbers, Same Month, Different Stories
The benchmark and the median measure different things, and the gap between them this August is the clearest evidence of what's actually happening downtown.
| Victoria Core condominiums, August 2026 | Change vs. August 2025 |
|---|---|
| MLS® HPI benchmark | +0.9% |
| Median sale price | -2.7% |
The benchmark tracks a hypothetical typical unit with consistent characteristics over time, so it filters out shifts in what's actually selling. The median just reports the middle price of whatever changed hands that month. When the benchmark holds steady but the median drops, it usually means the mix of buyers shifted toward smaller, cheaper units rather than typical values falling across the board.
That fits what's been happening in Victoria's condo segment for most of 2026. Buyers who sat out 2025 waiting for the market to move are stepping back in, but they're disproportionately entry-level buyers chasing lower price points, not move-up buyers trading into larger units. More transactions, at a lower average price point, produces exactly this pattern: sales volume up, benchmark flat to slightly positive, median down.
What's Actually Moving Through Downtown's Resale Market
Zoom into the downtown core specifically and the pattern has been building for longer than one August. Resale transactions in the downtown area reached just over 370 in 2025, up from roughly 340 the year before. Prices moved the other direction. The average sale price fell to just under $586,000 in 2025 from about $602,000 in 2024, and days on market for an active downtown listing climbed to nearly 50, roughly double what it was a few years earlier.
So the story isn't new. It's the same shape it's been in for two years: more listings changing hands, at softer prices, taking longer to sell. August's regional numbers are just the most recent snapshot of a trend that's been visible downtown since 2023.
The Building That Explains the Rest
Here's the part of the story that doesn't show up in a monthly sales release, and it's the part that matters most if you're trying to figure out whether this softness is temporary or structural.
No new strata condominium project has broken ground in downtown Victoria since 2022. The last two buildings to complete were Haven, a 104-unit building on Johnson Street developed in partnership with BC Housing, and Nest, a 107-unit tower on Yates Street. Both sold out during their 2022 presale campaigns. Haven reached occupancy in late 2024, Nest in early fall of that year, and the final unsold unit between the two, a two-bedroom with parking and storage, found a buyer during the 2025 holiday season at $629,900.
Since then, nothing. Industry watchers who track the city's development pipeline don't expect a new downtown strata launch before 2027 at the earliest, and what is coming out of the ground in the meantime isn't ownership product at all. Phase one of a project at 1045 Yates Street will deliver 526 rental units, including 80 affordable homes, across a 20-storey and a 21-storey tower, with two more phases adding roughly 1,100 additional rental units in towers reaching 28 to 32 storeys over the next several years. On Caledonia Avenue at Douglas Street, on the site of a former White Spot restaurant and hotel, a three-tower rental project is under construction that will add about 500 more units. An earlier version of that plan once included a condominium tower. It was converted to rental before construction began.
Meanwhile, the presale incentives showing up across Greater Victoria this year, credits worth up to roughly $7,000, deposit deferrals, included parking and storage, are concentrated in Saanich, Langford, Colwood and the West Shore, where the bulk of new residential construction is happening. Downtown isn't part of that conversation because there's no new downtown strata product to incentivize.
Put plainly: today's buyer's market for a downtown condo exists partly because there's no fresh ownership inventory competing with the resale stock that's already sitting on MLS. Every unit for sale downtown right now is being sold by an existing owner into a pool of buyers who have no presale alternative in the core. That's a different situation than a market where demand has genuinely dried up. It's a market where the supply pipeline for ownership housing has been redirected toward rental for the next several years.
What This Means If You're Weighing Downtown Against Other Options
If you're comparing a downtown or Vic West condo against options further out in Saanich or the West Shore, it helps to know that Victoria and Vic West are reported together in most standard board statistics, even though the Johnson Street Bridge is a real dividing line for how these two areas actually live and feel. A unit near the bridge in Vic West and a unit in a downtown tower are being weighed by very different buyers, even when the sales data lumps them into one line.
The softness in downtown condo prices right now gives buyers real room, longer to view units, more leverage to negotiate, more time to review a building's documents before waiving conditions. That part of the current market is genuine and worth using if you're ready to buy. What it isn't is a guarantee that this exact combination of conditions holds indefinitely. With no new strata competition arriving downtown for at least another year or two, and possibly longer, the resale inventory sitting on the market now is likely to be absorbed without much fresh supply behind it to keep prices soft.
None of this is a prediction about where prices go next. It's a description of an unusual setup: a genuine buyer's market sitting on top of a genuine supply gap, at the same time, in the same nine or so blocks.
Does a softer median mean downtown condos are a bad investment right now? Not on its own. A lower median mostly reflects which units sold, not a broad drop in value. The benchmark, which controls for that mix, was essentially flat to slightly positive over the same period. What buyers should weigh is the specific unit and building, not the headline median.
Should I wait for prices to drop further before buying downtown? That depends on your timeline and what you're comparing it to. The forces that produced this year's softness, more entry-level resale activity and a stalled presale pipeline, are structural rather than seasonal, and there's no clear signal they reverse quickly. Waiting on the assumption that a brand new downtown condo building will suddenly compete for your business isn't realistic before 2027 at the earliest.
What about strata fees and special levies in older downtown buildings? This matters more downtown than almost anywhere else in Greater Victoria, given how many buildings are approaching or past the age where major repairs come due. If you're getting serious about a specific building, our guide to strata ownership in Victoria walks through what to ask for and what the numbers actually mean before you write an offer.
Numbers like these change every month, and the specific building you're considering will have its own story that a regional average can't tell you. If you want help reading a particular downtown or Vic West listing against what's actually happening in that building and that block, Kash Burley is happy to walk through it with you. And if you're weighing a downtown purchase against selling something you already own elsewhere in Greater Victoria first, get your free home valuation to see where that math actually starts.
