Sask. Realtors Association shines spotlight on rising housing prices

Housing prices in Saskatchewan continue to rise, with the provincial benchmark price hitting a new record of $347,300 last month.

The Saskatchewan Realtors Association said that figure represents an increase of nearly five per cent over April of 2025, while warning that rising prices and persistent challenges with low inventory levels are beginning to erode the affordability advantage the province has long enjoyed.

Read more:

• Record house price increases eroding Saskatchewan’s affordability advantage
• Saskatchewan home prices rising as supply remains low: Realtors association
• Housing minister says Liberal ridings aren’t favoured for funding after Gladu comment

Tyler Hudy, the association’s vice-president of public affairs and communications, joined The Evan Bray Show on Thursday to take a closer look at the numbers and which regions of the province are feeling the greatest pressure.

Listen to the full interview with Hudy, or read the transcript below:

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

EVAN BRAY: I just told a story about my friend who threw his house on the market, and literally within hours there was a bidding war and it sold. That seems to be pretty standard these days in the province.

TYLER HUDY: Yeah, it’s a reality for many, and if you look at Saskatoon in the last two months, you’re looking at both those months of the listing price going for over 100 per cent of asking. So those bidding wars are definitely happening in jurisdictions across the province.

BRAY: Let’s talk about Saskatoon’s market for a second. I want to talk about the whole province, but I saw a comment about Saskatoon’s market surpassing potentially Edmonton in the next three years. We’ve already seen it pass Winnipeg’s. What is this trend about?

HUDY: I think there’s a couple of things that are playing into this. And I you said it in your preamble that the affordability advantage that Saskatchewan is something that people from across the country continue to recognize, and they’re continuing to choose Saskatchewan because of that affordability advantage.

But what we’re seeing is, of course, the offspring of that. With more people coming to Saskatchewan and choosing to call the province home, there’s less inventory and that is continuing to drive up the prices. And we’re seeing that not just in our major centres, but we’re seeing that in some of our smaller communities across the province.

BRAY: Is it the inventory that’s the problem? Or are we seeing that many more people in the market looking to buy a home?

HUDY: I think it’s a combination of both. So if you look at inventory, for example, for Saskatoon, inventory is down 50 per cent from its 10-year average. If you look at that number from across the provincial standpoint, we’re also at 50 per cent below inventory.

There’s a few things that play into that. As you know, the single detached home that most people are looking for continues to kind of rise in prices, and it’s pricing some people out of those homes. We’re also missing the supply side of things in those more kind of affordable units — the duplexes, the row homes. There’s not enough of those kind of missing middle homes in the market to offset that.

BRAY: I think about the affordability issue, and as we continue to want to grow this province from an economic standpoint, we usually will talk about attracting investment to the province, which we know leads to attracting jobs to the province. The housing market, you don’t want that to be a stumbling block in all of this, but there is some fear that with these kind of continually escalating prices, it might be a hiccup. How do you see that?

HUDY: Yeah, you said that perfectly. The impact goes so much further beyond housing. As that housing supply is low, it impacts things like labor mobility and business attraction, and really the economic growth of the province.

Housing itself is not just a housing market. It’s one of those kind of core pillars of economic confidence. We can’t really continue to normalize the level of supply that we have, because we risk not only eroding that affordability advantage, but the economic stability of the province, for people to come here, to work, to raise a family, to buy a home. All those things are being impacted right here, right now.

BRAY: I’ve always been of the understanding that many people wait until springtime to put their home on the market purposefully, because the homes don’t sell quite as well in the winter. So is it normal to see low inventory levels in the spring?

HUDY: We’ve had a significantly longer winter than I think many people have expected, which has made people sit on the sidelines a little bit longer than we were expecting, heading into the spring market.

The good news with that is new listings in some of the centres are up. We do see a little bit of a blip in new listings, a little bit of a blip in inventory, but at the end of the day what we’re looking at is the inventory level that is still significantly below the average over the last 10 years.

BRAY: A lot of the government programs that we’ve heard, particularly coming out of the federal government, are aimed at trying to make it easier for first-time home buyers. What’s the market like right now for first-time or new home buyers? And do you have a sense people are discouraged by what they’re finding?

HUDY: I think first-time home buyers are probably the ones that that hit at my heart and I know a lot of our realtors hearts the most over the last little bit here.

And yes, there have been some programs like the GST exemption on new-home construction and the provincial government’s PST exemption on new-home construction. All those things are definitely improving and helping improve that affordability conversation.

But at the end of the day, if you were to look — and I always reference a family or an individual who’s looking to enter the housing market for the first time — two years ago, they were looking to start saving, building that money so that they could put the down payment on the home. If they are now ready, not only is the price of that home anywhere between five to 10 per cent more than when they started saving two years ago, but they’re also in a place where there’s 1,520-plus other people looking to purchase that same home.

I know our members are hearing the frustrations of those challenges, and I really do feel for the first-time home buyers who are looking to enter the market.

BRAY: How do condos and the rental market impact this discussion?

HUDY: If we look at housing along the entire continuum and the flow and the movement of people from the rental market into the housing market and down that line, there is some real pressure.

Things get backed up when we have low inventory and people can’t move from a rental that they were in into home ownership. That backs up the rental supply. That makes it a little bit more full. That puts pressure on that side of the continuum, and that doesn’t allow people to move.

And if we look at the other end, it goes back to your story about your friend who was looking to downsize because the kids have left home and they want something a little bit smaller now. When they go to look to sell the home that they’ve been in for years, what they’re moving into is also subject to that price pressure that we’re feeling, so no longer is equity that they’ve built as advantageous as it was maybe five, 10 years ago. It’s really stalling people on that end of the continuum from downsizing.

BRAY: Are there some regions that are feeling the pressure differently than others? Can you do a quick rundown for the province?

HUDY: If we if we look at our two major centres, Saskatoon and Regina, they’re feeling the biggest pressure when it comes to supply.

If we look back to 2018, we had about seven to eight months of supply, which was a great housing market for people and for choice. Around ‘24 we were at about two months of supply, and now we’re consistently below that level. So that’s to say if no new houses came online in the next 30-plus days, there would be no homes available.

One of the jurisdictions that is feeling that the most is some of the bedroom communities outside of Saskatoon. Martinsville, for example, has less than a month of supply. So if no new homes came online in 30 days, or less than 30 days, there would be no options for buyers in those markets.

BRAY: What about some of the rural areas specifically? Any trends there?

HUDY: Even some of those smaller communities are feeling some of the biggest price increases. Melville’s experiencing a 17 per cent benchmark price increase. Yorkton stands at 14-and-a-half per cent. Swift Current’s at 11.8 per cent, so it’s not just our major centres that are feeling the price pressures. It’s some of the smaller communities, and that reaches across the province.

BRAY: That feels important to me, given that’s where a lot of economic growth is happening. When you see new mines, new exploration, even things like canola crush, a lot of times it’s in smaller communities, where people are looking for new homes or or to move into an existing home. So I feel like that’s an important part of this discussion.

HUDY: Absolutely. So if we look at a community like Humboldt, which is relatively close to the new Jansen mine that’s being built, the benchmark price there is up 9.4 per cent at $327,000, and they’re not immune to the same inventory and lifting pressures that the rest of the province is facing.

So when we have these major investments coming online, we have to ensure that at the municipal, the provincial and the federal levels, that they all have the programs in place to get the infrastructure in the ground so that we can have homes for these people who are choosing this province to work because of these major investments.

BRAY: Are we doing anything to try and alleviate this pressure?

HUDY: I think, at the end of the day, it’s a collaborative approach with all levels of government. We’ve seen some great signals from the provincial governments with the exemptions and the opportunities, the infrastructure programs in place to kind of get the wastewater and the non-super-attractive part of housing together.

We’re continuing to work with all levels of governments and really hope that they can see that we’re standing out compared to the rest of the country when it comes to what our housing market is doing, and the opportunities that are on the horizon.

BRAY: Is your latest market watch available for people to take a look at?

HUDY: Yeah, we produce our market stats monthly. They’re all available at sra.ca.

Once you look at that data, I highly recommend reaching out to a local realtor to provide that boots-on-the-ground perspective of what’s happening in their market.