Everyone Is Retreating. That's the Signal.

Vancouver’s development market is effectively frozen. Sales at a 25-year low. No new presale launches for entire months in 2025. Developers cancelling projects. Inventory up 20% year over year. The headlines are unanimous: wait, watch, and don’t commit.

That consensus is the most important signal in the market right now. And it points in the opposite direction from what most people are acting on.

Large developers are sitting out — and they have a reason

The developers on the sidelines right now aren’t wrong. They’re rational actors responding correctly to the market they built their playbook for.

The presale model required rising prices, confident buyers, and two-year permitting timelines. In 2018, 750 new units typically launched into presale in January alone. In 2025, that number across the whole month was zero. The machine that financed traditional Vancouver development — sell before you build — stopped. So the people who depend on it stopped too.

And they can’t change their playbook for the new small-scale asset class.

This isn’t just a Vancouver story. The CMHC Spring 2026 Housing Supply Report shows the same dynamic in Toronto: for the first time on record, buildings with three to five units were more prevalent in new construction starts than projects with more than 100 units. Toronto also saw purpose-built rental starts exceed condo apartment starts for the first time this century — driven not by opportunity but by necessity, as CMHC GTA economist Jordan Nanowski put it: “out of necessity, not because it’s super enticing.”

The traditional players are also too large and centralized for a ubiquitous, decentralized, small-scale housing structure — which is what multiplexes are.

Bill 44 created by-right permitting for 4-to-6 unit multiplexes on single-family lots across every municipality in BC. No preselling. No rezoning. No public hearing. No council vote. The province handed the industry a tool that used to cost years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to obtain. The traditional players are too busy managing frozen tower projects to pick it up.

The math that doesn’t need the market to recover

A standardized 6-plex on a flat lot with a repeatable design, same spec, same subtrade relationships every time — operates on a spread, not a bet.

The spread between what it costs to build and what a buyer pays for a finished, move-in-ready unit at a price between a condo and a detached home. That spread doesn’t require price appreciation. It doesn’t require buyer FOMO. It doesn’t require a market recovery.

It requires two things: disciplined cost control through vertical integration, and a product at the price point where actual demand still exists. Entry-level ground-oriented homes are exactly where Vancouver demand has concentrated as everything else softened. That’s the product. That’s the price point. That’s where demand is.

And unlike a tower, a 6-plex doesn’t need presales to finance construction. It sells on completion — which in a buyer’s market is actually a feature, not a liability. The buyer gets a finished product. No three-year wait on an unbuilt promise.

The Toronto data supports this. MoveSmart analysis of 779 multiplex permits issued between 2023 and Q3 2025 found 55% of leased units were two-bedroom and 23% were three-bedroom — the family-sized product that condo towers never built. Demand for that product isn’t soft. It just hasn’t been served.

Metric	Condo Tower	6-Plex Multiplex
Financing trigger	70% presales required	Completion sale
Price point	Studio/1-bed condo	Entry-level ground-floor unit
Market dependency	Rising prices + buyer confidence	Disciplined cost control
Permitting	Discretionary (months to years)	By-right under Bill 44
Who’s building now	Paused	Active

The compounding advantage others can’t access

There’s a second compounding effect that doesn’t get enough attention: the efficiency curve.

Every repeated build on the same typology, same floor plan, same permit drawings, same spec — recovers cost. Reused drawings. Preferred subtrade rates that come with volume and reliability. Bulk material purchasing. The process markup that sits inside every construction project doesn’t disappear, but it compresses. The third build is cheaper than the first. The tenth is cheaper than the third.

The competitors building one-off custom projects never get on this curve. They quote every project fresh, permit every project fresh, and train every crew fresh. Their costs are fixed by the industry standard.

In a frozen market with contracting supply, a falling cost curve is a structural moat.

Three signals I’m watching in Q2 2026

Subtrade availability. Right now, trades are accessible and pricing is competitive because large project pipelines have dried up. The moment the towers start to recover, trade competition returns and pricing goes with it. We’re not there yet.

Land basis in target municipalities. 2% of all properties in Vancouver, Burnaby, and the City of North Vancouver are still pricing lots at levels where the 6-plex proforma pencils at 100% ROE. A few more months of buyer-side hesitation and that basis starts improving further. A recovery in sentiment flips it.

Bill 44 adoption rate by other developers. PlexRank™ screens the full MLS daily. We can see how many of the viable lots are actually transacting into development versus sitting. Right now, most are sitting. When that ratio shifts, the window is closing.

The bottom line

Frozen markets feel dangerous. They are dangerous — for people with the wrong product, the wrong cost structure, and the wrong financing model.

For a standardized, vertically integrated 6-plex model with by-right permitting and a buyer’s market price point, a frozen market is simply a market with less competition. The physical building materials haven’t changed. The process is where the advantage lives. And right now, our process is running while everyone else’s is paused.

That’s not optimism. That’s arithmetic.

The signal is: build now.

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The Toronto Star reported in March 2026 that Toronto homebuilders are pivoting to multiplexes and smaller projects — driven by the same dynamics described here. The CMHC Spring 2026 Housing Supply Report confirmed the national trend: for the first time on record, small-plex starts outnumbered large tower starts in Toronto.

VanPlex Technologies screens the full Metro Vancouver MLS daily using PlexRank™ to identify 6-plex development opportunities. If you’re an accredited investor and want to explore joining VanPlex’s next 100% build, reach out directly.

— David Babakaiff, CEO & Co-Founder, VanPlex | PlexRank™ | Profit with Multiplex