St. John’s housing market stays hot as national trends cool
N.L.’s capital saw 10 per cent price growth in past year
As Canadian real estate prices cooled in 2025, Newfoundland and Labrador’s capital city continued to climb.
The latest numbers from the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) show the average sale price in St. John’s increased 9.6 per cent from December 2024 to December 2025.
The average sale price in Canada, however, went down 0.1 per cent.
Shaun Cathcart, a senior economist with CREA, said the biggest factor has been a critically low number of houses on the market in St. John’s.
“The overall number of homes for sale right now is at a 20-year low,” Cathcart told CBC Radio’s St. John’s Morning Show.
Cathcart said the hot market kicked off around the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Prior to that, prices were depressed and listings were elevated.
He said CREA’s insights show three waves of population growth during the pandemic years. First came young people choosing to resettle in smaller places, then came an older demographic from mainland Canada, and finally there was a spike in international immigration in 2023 and 2024.
Nicole Darbaz, a local realtor, said the housing market did a complete 180 over the course of the pandemic and has only continued to benefit the seller ever since.
“The last year has been similar to what we’ve seen since 2020, which is a continued decrease in supply and a continued increase in demand,” she said. “Obviously that leads to price growth.”
Darbaz said the nearly 10 per cent price growth from 2024 to 2025 is the highest the local market has seen in the last five years.
She’s not surprised to see St. John’s bucking national trends.
“We act as our own bubble and historically you could see that,” she said. “During the financial recession, 2008 to 2014, we took off. The world did something completely different. So we really have a microeconomic climate here.”
Expect the temperature to cool, says CREA
Cathcart says it’s only a matter of time before the market begins to correct itself.
International immigration has slowed down, and so has the number of people coming to Newfoundland and Labrador from across Canada.
“It looks like you might be settling into a little bit of a Goldilocks zone right now that you’ve never really been in before of just moderate, decent population growth that will continue to support housing without overwhelming it,” Cathcart said.
CREA’s prediction is the market will cool over the span of 2026 and sales could be driven by first-time home buyers — for the first time in a long time — as prices stabilize.
Cathcart said young buyers are finally getting back in the door, as interest rates are at the lowest they’ve been since a spike in 2023 and 2024.
“If you think about people in their late 20s or early 30s, they’ve been shut out of this market for four years now,” he said. “So that’s really built up a lot of demand. Think of it as water behind a dam.”
Darbaz said the market isn’t showing signs of slowing down yet. There are still bidding wars happening with multiple offers on newly-listed properties, causing houses to sell as much as $100,000 over asking price.
She said the cost of new construction is also a big factor in why houses are selling for more, as the price tag to build new is well above the listed price of a similar, existing home. She gave an example of a client who bought a house listed for $600,000 with an offer of $660,000 for a house that would have cost $830,000 to build new.
The lack of new builds is adding to the pinch in supply that’s pushing up prices.
“There is not enough supply to continue to meet the demand,” Darbaz said. “My forecast, personally, is that I think we’re going to see sustained demand right through at least to the end of our spring market, which is the end of June.”
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With files from the St. John's Morning Show