If you pay attention to real estate news, you have likely hear a smattering of terms, Buyers Market, Balanced Market, Days On Market, Months of Inventory, Benchmark Price, among others. I will try to help you understand these terms, and how to calculate what “type” of market it is. Why am I giving you this info? Isn’t it my job to do this for you? Correct! However, I like to provide too much info as opposed to too little, if I tell you there are only 3 months of inventory for bungalows in High River, naturally, you’re going to ask: What does that mean? How did you get there?
Remember when your teacher said you’ll use math one day? Here it is!
Lets Start with Terms
Buyer’s Market: Ah, a buyer’s market, these are the ones where buyers get to choose from a litany of homes, there is a lot of supply, but very little demand. This usually means buyers are in a stronger position to negotiate in their favour, and homes will stay on the market for longer. We usually have 5 to 12 months of inventory for this market.
Seller’s Market: This is the market where you hear about bidding fights, over asking sale prices, and back to back showings. During a sellers market, they have the power, and can more easily negotiate in their favour. In this market, we usually have 0 to 2 months of Inventory.
Balanced Market: This is the happy place, it doesn’t happen often, but this is where there is enough inventory coming onto the market, and enough buyers out looking for a new place to keep inventory at 3 to 4 months.
Absorption Rate: This is how quickly homes are selling, and how many, usually this gets represented as a percentage.
Days On Market: Days On Market (DOM) is how long a home stays on market, starting at 0 when it is listed, and finishing at x when the home is firm sold.
Benchmark Price: This is where your average, run of the mill home, in a run of the mill community should be selling for.
Average Price: Average sale price of homes over a period of time. These numbers are fun, because you get some homes as cheap as 250K, and as high as 2.5mil, so it is not the most accurate number.
Median Price: The middle price of homes, the peak of the bell curve for pricing.
Home Pricing Index (HPI): A really advanced version of benchmark price, this takes into account attributes that buyers assign to a property and uses over 15 years of MLS data to give us a more accurate number. This is usually represented as a single digit with 2 decimal places (x.yz).
Active: Homes that are active on the market, and do not have an offer.
Pending (Conditionally Sold): Homes that have accepted an offer, and are waiting for conditions to be satisfied.
Sold: Sold Firm homes, these are no longer for sale.
Terminated: The seller took the home off the market, this could be for a multitude of reasons (stale listing, unhappy with performance, change of heart etc).
Withdrawn: Like terminated, except it is just a pause on the listing.
Expired: Seller Representation Agreements (Listing Contracts) have an expiry date, an expired listing just means that that date has been reached, so the home has been removed from the market.
How to Calculate the Market
So, to do this, we need to find some data first. I will be pulling data for the Calgary Area, you may need to find different sources for data.
There are a few places you can find the data, most require you to leave some contact information as they require you to sign up/login. Zolo, House Sigma, Honest Door, My Website as well allows you to search solds. What you need to know is how many homes sold over the last 3 months. The other pieces of data are: how many homes are Active, and how many homes are Conditionally Sold, this is a lot easier to find as the information shows up easily on realtor.ca. From there, the math is pretty easy.
Active Homes + Pending / (Homes that sold in the last 3 months / 3) = Total Months of Inventory
So for High River detached homes as of August 17, 2026 (when I typed up the blog post, sorry, forgot to click “schedule” on posting it!), it would look like:
33 + 4 / (47 / 3) = 2.36 months of inventory.
See? Easy! The trick is finding reliable data that isn’t filled with clutter. If you are looking for months of inventory for detached homes, make sure you aren’t included Semi-Detached or Townhomes, and if you want to get really granular with it, break it down by type of home (bungalow, 2 storey, etc). Just be cautious about getting too specific, because it limits your data pool. This data can be pulled for both the whole city, or your specific community. For Calgary, you may just want to focus on your community and the nearby surrounding ones, but for a smaller town like High River, you can pull the whole dataset.
You’ll also notice the number is falling somewhere between Seller’s and Balanced Market, so now we should look at the Days On Market, this is a bit more interesting to find, I pulled it up on Zolo and apparently for today it is saying 0 Days on Market, which is not right.
Through the Calgary Real Estate Board, I am seeing this trend:
April Average DOM: 40
May Average DOM: 66 days
June Average DOM: 34 days
July Average DOM: 39 days
First rule of Statistics: They lie. Remember when I described averages up at the top of the page? This is where it can come into play, May saw a huge jump in DOM because 3 homes sold after over 200 days on market, and another sold after just over 100 days.
But, I hear you say “Nick, none of this is helping and I am even more confused than before, besides,my uncle’s brother second detached cousin said that it is a Seller’s market right now!” Well, he could be right, market type is very much a shades of gray calculation, I prefer to get some details about what you are looking for first, type of home, price point, condition of home even, and from there I give my opinion as to where that home that you are looking for or selling will fall as far as market type.
If you want some details and a rough estimate of the type of market you would experience for the home you are selling, or the home you are looking for, let me know!
