In real estate, timing the market is just as important as time in the market. Although you can’t determine the best time to buy or sell a property without insider knowledge, you can increase your chances of getting what you want when you listen to pundits. Here’s what the experts think real estate in Canada and the United States will look like in the next five years.
Canada’s Home Prices Will Surge
An Equiton Research Fund-commissioned study from Concordia University’s Molson School of Business published in July 2025 found that prevailing housing supply trends will cause home prices in Canada to spike in the near future. Erkan Yönder, the author and associate professor of real estate finance at the university, and his team used artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze data from different government sources to estimate various long-term housing price movements.
“This is the first time that data-driven models have been used to quantify the complicated interplay between demographics, input costs, housing supply and home prices in Canada,” said Yönder, commenting on their use of neural network AI to forecast where the nation’s real estate industry is heading.
The researchers followed Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s projection that the country needs to build 3.5 million housing units by 2030 to satisfy rising demand. Using the AI platform, the team found that median prices in Vancouver and Toronto could reach $2.8 million and $1.8 million respectively by 2032 if the rate of housing completions remained the same.
More Commercial Real Estate Firms Will Be AI-Driven
An analysis by Morgan Stanley Research in 2025 revealed that AI innovations could save commercial real estate companies and real estate investment trusts (REITs) $34 billion in efficiency gains by 2030. The researchers looked at the operations of 162 organizations that collectively employed 525,000 people and spent $92 billion on labor and found that 37% of the tasks they performed were automatable.
Ronald Kamdem, head of U.S. REITs and commercial real estate research at Morgan Stanley said, “Our recent works suggests that operating efficiencies, primarily through labor cost savings, represent the greatest opportunity for real estate companies to capitalize on AI in the next three to five years.”
Automating processes should unburden real estate brokers and agents of tasks outside of their core competencies, allowing them to focus on what they do best, which is to use their expertise and specialized experience to help the investors they represent negotiate favorable deals. Real estate professionals can use AI-assisted software to analyze a broader range of sale and lease comps — including off-market listings — to help clients succeed in transactions.
U.S. Luxury Residential Housing Market Will Steadily Grow
The luxury segment of the U.S. residential real estate market will continue to flourish as more high-net-worth individuals cash in their holdings in the stock market and park their money in houses instead. Rich individuals who want to play defense instead of offense regarding their wealth gravitate toward assets with less volatile prices over the medium term. Luxury properties generally offer long-term market stability, so they fit the bill.
Anthony Smith, senior economist at Realtor.com®, explains that the number of listings worth over $1 million has moderated since early 2022, after skyrocketing in the beginning of 2020. This suggests “the next five years will likely reflect a steadier, more sustainable expansion rather than the outsized gains seen earlier in the decade.”
Do These Projections Benefit Your Plans in the Next Five Years?
Nobody can predict what may happen next in real estate better than pundits, but none of them own a crystal ball. Their educated guesses may be off sometimes. Pay attention to local and regional market conditions and determine whether they deviate from national trends to make an informed decision when buying or selling a property.
