WASHINGTON, D.C. — Residents in Gold Canyon, Arizona, enjoy stunning views of desert landscapes and panoramic vistas — especially the majestic Superstition Mountains — which is why it’s a highly sought-after area for vacation homes.
In the past, it has been a prime target for Canadians seeking warm retirement or seasonal homes, but not anymore.
“All my Canadian clients I had, I sold their homes earlier this year, and they have no interest in buying anything at all,” said Redfin real estate agent Heather Mahmood-Corley. “They all left.”
The Phoenix-area realtor explained that her colleagues have seen the same drop in Canadian business. Their fleeing clients had owned second homes — spending up to six months each year in the Copper State — for years, many of them long before COVID. But this year, Mahmood-Corley’s clients told her they wanted out.
This is part of a larger trend. Strained U.S.-Canada relations have led to falling Canadian interest in buying American properties, a trend that is intersecting with a cooling U.S. housing market.
Redfin, a real estate brokerage company that offers a popular search tool for home buyers, has seen a huge drop in Canadian traffic this year. The number of Canadian
Redfin.com
searchers for U.S. properties has dropped roughly 22 per cent year-over-year. The decline started in February, just as U.S. President Donald Trump announced 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian exports, and the biggest drop, 34.2 per cent (YoY), came in April, coinciding with the so-called “Liberation Day.” Declines have continued through July, though it eased slightly last month to a 19.4 per cent decline.
The falling interest coincides with a slowdown in domestic U.S. home sales as well, but Chen Zhao, Redfin’s head of economics research, says the drop has been far more pronounced for Canadian buyers. While overall searches “are down a little bit,” Chen says, “they’re not down anything close to what we’re seeing from Canadian buyers.”
Canadians have long represented a strong proportion of foreign purchases in the U.S. Recent data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR), which spanned from April 2024 to March 2025 — notably pre-tariffs — showed that Canadians last year made up 14 per cent of foreign buyers, spending about $6.2 billion. That’s up from 13 per cent and $5.9 billion, respectively, for the year before.
Their most popular destinations? Florida has long been No. 1, followed by Arizona, California, and Hawaii.
Foreign-buyer purchases for April 2024 to March 2025, according to NAR, saw a 44 per cent increase from the year before, the first year-over-year increase recorded since 2017.
Matt Christopherson, NAR’s director of business and consumer research, says there have been more buying opportunities in the U.S. for foreign investors because domesti
c homebuyers have been drastically slowed down in recent years by soaring interest rates, with many “waiting on the sidelines for better affordability conditions.”
Canadians buying in the U.S., however, are unhampered by the interest rates, he says, because they most likely don’t need mortgages. “Fifty-seven per cent of Canadian buyers paid all cash this past year,”
Christopherson said.
Canada’s U.S. purchases were beaten last year only by Chinese buyers, who represented 15 per cent of international transactions, for a whopping US$13.7 billion worth of sales. “China’s housing market has had a much slower recovery coming out of the pandemic. So their investors are looking elsewhere for exposure to other markets,” Christopherson noted.
Realtors in Florida and Arizona, Canadians’ top two destinations, have seen severe downturns this year amid tariff-related trade tensions and Trump’s fiery 51st state rhetoric.
“What drove a lot of [Canadians] out was politics,” said Mahmood-Corley. “‘I am embarrassed to own a property here in the United States,’” one client told her, while others said they didn’t want to spend their money in the U.S.
“We don’t have Canadian buyers right now,” says broker Kevin Bartlett, owner of Knowledge Base Real Estate in Estero, Florida, just south of Cape Coral and Fort Myers. Where 50 per cent of Bartlett’s clients used to be from Canada, now “everyone wants to get out of America.”
But it’s not just the trade war that’s driving down foreign business. “It’s tariffs, it’s the dollar, it’s the cost of living,” Bartlett said, referring to how recent hurricane seasons have driven up insurance and HOA costs.
The downturn also comes amid a weakening of the Canadian dollar. A loonie at 70–72 cents U.S. adds 30 per cent to a purchase.
Overall, Canadian purchases of U.S. properties — whether the figures soar or plummet — won’t have a huge impact. While Canadians made up 14 per cent of last year’s foreign buyers, foreign purchases overall are just two per cent of U.S. home sales. But in a cooling U.S. housing market, it certainly doesn’t help realtors in the areas most affected. Bartlett, for example, says his sales are down 50 per cent this year.
Steven Glick, director of mortgage sales for HomeAbroad, says he’s still seeing interest from Canadian buyers, but he acknowledges that something has changed
. “
I think there’s been some hesitation from our current client base, kind of waiting things out and being a little more hesitant to pull the trigger,” he said.
Overall, the slowdown in the U.S. market hasn’t impacted prices too much — the national median price is still up 1.7 per cent from this time last year — but in markets like southern Florida, prices are falling. “You’re starting to see a decrease where a lot of people are able to buy for 20 to 30 per cent under asking price, because there’s just so much more inventory now,” Glick added.
The pivot from a sellers’ to a buyers’ market has been more sudden in the Sunbelt. According to
Realtor.com
, there has been a 2.2 per cent year-over-year decline in Florida home prices as of May this year. Redfin data, meanwhile, shows a .72 per cent year-over-year decline in median prices in Arizona.
We won’t know the full extent of the drop in Canadian purchases until next year, when NAR releases its next report covering April 2025 to March 2026. But what we do know is that searches have plummeted since February, and Canadian purchases in places like Arizona nd Florida, normal hotspots for cross-border investments, are falling despite a drop in prices.
The overall impact of fleeing Canadians, especially in these popular areas, is being felt in other ways, too. “When [Canadians] come, they have second cars here, they go out, they spend a lot on restaurants and tourism,” said Mahmood-Corley. “And you just didn’t see the activity from that this year like you had in the past.”
Bartlett said he’s seen a huge impact in southern Florida. “We need to understand that (Canadians’) money was 100 per cent very valuable in our economy down here. They created probably a third of our tourism.”
Potential homebuyers in the U.S. have an eye on the Federal Reserve, and realtors are hoping to see a fall in interest rates in the months ahead, which would boost refinancing, sales, and, in turn, housing prices.
But Chen expects the Canadian buying trajectory to remain unchanged for the foreseeable future. “I think it’s likely to remain lower or muted, relative to what we’ve seen in the past,” she said, noting that a lot depends on the tariffs and increased trade volatility.
“Until those tensions subside,” Glick said, “I think you’re going to still see a continuing decrease in interested buyers.” But he also said the anger over trade tensions is likely to eventually subside as people become more numb to the politics.
By early 2026, Glick said a combination of dropped interest rates and the buyers’ market should be “big
contributing factors to seeing an increase in the market.”
National Post
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