64% of Canadians Say There Is No Perfect Time to Buy a Home: RBC 2026 Poll

RBC's poll is not a clean bullish signal. It is a psychology signal.

The headline is that 64% of Canadians say you can never really know when the right time is to buy a home. That sounds like people giving up on timing the market. But the buyer subset is more interesting: among people planning to buy within two years, 45% say now is the right time to buy.

That is not normal confidence. Fewer than half of active buyers say they are confident making homebuying decisions in today's market. This looks more like capitulation into action: buyers who spent years feeling priced out are starting to accept that the perfect entry point may never arrive.

For first-time buyers, that matters. They are the group most eager to step into the knife-catching contest because they have been the most marginalized by the last few years.

The first-time buyer number is the one I would not ignore. Among active buyers, 46% say current conditions are giving first-time buyers a chance to get into the market. Ontario is above the national average at 37%.

That lines up with the recent Teranet read that first-time buyers have become a larger force in Ontario's transaction mix. The psychology is simple: if you have already owned a home, you may be locked in, sitting on equity, or reluctant to trade one expensive payment for another. If you have never owned, you have been watching ownership move away from you for years.

So when prices soften, even a little, first-time buyers can be the group most tempted to step in. Not because the deal is easy. Because the alternative is another year of rent, uncertainty, and feeling like the train already left.

This is why national housing commentary keeps breaking. RBC's regional split is stark.

In Ontario, 38% of respondents call it a buyer's market and 24% call it a seller's market. In B.C., the buyer's-market read is also high at 39%. But Quebec and Atlantic Canada are the opposite: 57% in Quebec and 52% in Atlantic Canada call it a seller's market.

So the national buyer is dealing with two things at once: a countrywide affordability problem and very different local market structure. That is how you can have a national mood of uncertainty while some buyers feel urgency and others feel like they are still bidding into tight supply.

The harsh part of this poll is that even the buyers who see an opening are not saying the market became easy.

Among active buyers, 71% say inflation is causing them to save less for a home. 69% say they need to delay major purchases. 62% are cutting back vacations. 60% say they need to overhaul spending and saving habits. 53% say retirement savings may be redirected toward a home purchase.

That last number is the quiet warning. If the new buyer pool has to cannibalize future security to buy present shelter, the market may clear more transactions, but that does not make affordability healthy.