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Bungalows have been the top selling home style in Windsor-Essex every single month this year. Here's what that means if you're thinking about trading four bedrooms and a staircase for one floor living, including the part where you're bidding against buyers half your age.
I sat at a kitchen table in South Windsor a few weeks ago with a couple in their sixties. Three kids raised in that house, all of them grown and gone. Four bedrooms upstairs and three of the doors kept shut. The wife told me she had started doing laundry in stages, because the basement stairs had quietly turned into a project she needed to plan around.
They were not in trouble. No money problem, no health crisis, nothing forcing anybody's hand. They just kept looking at each other and asking the same question. How much longer are we going to keep climbing these stairs for no reason?
That conversation comes up more often every year around here, and the market is showing it in the numbers. So let me lay out what downsizing in Windsor-Essex actually looks like right now, including the part where you end up bidding against people half your age for the exact same house.
Our board tracks which style of home sells each month, and the bungalow has won every single month of 2026. Not narrowly, either.
In June, 113 bungalows sold across Windsor-Essex at an average of $448,331. The next closest style was the ranch at 71 sales, then the two storey at 65. April looked the same, with 109 bungalows moving at an average of $464,440. Whatever else is going on in this market, the single storey house is what people are actually buying.
Here's the full June picture, because the price differences matter more than most people expect:
Look at that list again. A bungalow averages $448,331 and a ranch averages $704,800. That is a gap of more than $256,000 between two things most people describe with the same four words: a house without stairs.
The labels are not marketing fluff, and around here they mean specific things. A bungalow is usually a modest single storey, often built between the 1950s and the 1970s, compact footprint with a full basement underneath. A ranch is single storey too, but wider and newer, spread across a bigger lot with more square footage on the main floor. A raised ranch sits the main floor higher so the basement is partly above grade, which is why those lower levels get proper windows and finish out like real living space. A one and a half storey has a partial upper floor tucked under the roofline, and you see plenty of them in the older Windsor neighbourhoods.
Why should you care about any of this? Two reasons, and both of them cost money.
If you're buying and you only ever search the word bungalow, you're filtering out ranches and raised ranches that would suit you perfectly. And if you're selling, having your home listed under the wrong style pulls the wrong buyers and drags your comparables down with it. I have seen a raised ranch marketed as a bungalow and priced against bungalow comps, and that mistake left real money sitting on the table. When you're looking, filter by style properly rather than typing one word into a search bar and assuming you've seen everything out there.
This is the number everybody wants and nobody publishes honestly, so let me work it using the county's own averages.
Say you're selling the average two storey at $684,000 and buying the average bungalow at $448,000. The gap between those two is about $236,000, and that is the figure people do in their head at the kitchen table. It's also wrong, because nobody hands you the difference in a bag.
On the sale, commission is negotiable and varies between brokerages, but if you budget 5% plus HST you won't get a surprise. On $684,000 that runs about $38,650. Add roughly $1,500 for your lawyer to close it out and discharge the mortgage. Call it $40,150 in selling costs, which leaves you around $643,850 assuming you own the place free and clear.
On the purchase, Ontario land transfer tax on a $448,000 home is $5,435. Worth knowing: Toronto is the only municipality in the province that charges its own land transfer tax on top of the provincial one, so buying here you pay the provincial tax only. Also worth knowing, and this one catches people every time, there is no first time buyer rebate for you. You've owned before, so that $4,000 refund isn't yours to claim. Add about $2,000 for legal work and title insurance plus $2,500 to move, and you're near $9,950.
Net it all out and you walk away with roughly $186,000 in cash.
So the honest version is that a $236,000 gap becomes about $186,000 in your pocket. Friction eats close to $50,000 of it. That's not a reason to skip the move, but it is a reason to stop planning around the sticker gap. If you want to run your own figures, the land transfer tax and closing cost calculators will do it in a couple of minutes.
One more thing, and it's the best part. That $186,000 comes to you tax free. Your principal residence is exempt from capital gains in Canada, so if you bought that house in 1994 for $135,000 and sell it for $684,000, the government does not take a cut of the gain. For a lot of the people I sit down with, that is the single largest tax free event of their entire lives.
The gap between what your house sells for and what a bungalow costs is not what you keep. Transaction costs take about fifty thousand out of the middle, and knowing that before you list is the difference between a plan and a hope.
Here's what surprises my downsizing clients most, and it's something I try to say out loud before we start touring anything.
You are not competing with other retirees. You're competing with twenty eight year olds.
Think about what the bungalow actually is. To you it's one floor living and the end of the stairs problem. To a young couple in East Windsor holding a preapproval letter, it's the cheapest detached house on the board. At $448,331 against $684,212 for a two storey, the bungalow isn't just the downsizer's dream, it's the affordable way into the entire market. Nationally, 23% of Canadians between 18 and 34 say they plan to buy a first home within the next ten years, and around here that ambition lands on exactly the housing you want.
So a well kept bungalow in Riverside hits the market on a Thursday, and by Sunday there's an offer from a retired couple who just sold in South Windsor sitting next to an offer from a family buying their first place. Same house, two completely different stages of life, one seller choosing between them.
Which means you cannot approach this the way you'd approach a slow market. You need your financing sorted, your own home ready or already sold, and a decision made in advance about how you'll respond when there's competition. Showing up unprepared and hoping the good one waits for you is how downsizers lose three houses in a row.
The shortage isn't an accident, and it isn't temporary either. It's structural, and it comes from two things colliding.
Start with who lives here. Essex County's population is older than Ontario's average and it's aging faster than the province as a whole. The 65 and over group is the fastest growing age cohort in the region. Seniors were 17.7% of the local population back in 2016, and the projection puts them close to 24% by 2029. On top of the people already here, the county actively pulls in movers in the 55 and up bracket from other parts of Ontario, because the lake and the pace and the prices all appeal to somebody thinking about retirement.
Now look at what got built. The region's own affordable housing strategy describes our existing stock as predominantly large, single detached dwellings, and says plainly that this composition may limit housing choice, particularly for smaller households and seniors. We spent decades building four bedroom family homes in a county that is now filling up with two person households. That mismatch is the whole problem in one sentence.
And here's the part that really tightens the screw. Nationally, 65% of Canadians aged 65 and over report low or no availability of downsizing options where they live. Only 16% of seniors plan to move to a smaller home within ten years. Forty six percent say they intend to stay right where they are. Every one of those households staying put is a bungalow or a big family home that never comes to market, which means the churn that normally feeds inventory simply doesn't happen.
Fewer suitable bungalows leads to more people staying put, which leads to fewer listings of any kind. It's a loop that feeds itself, and it explains why the good ones move quickly even in a market carrying 2,237 active listings.
Not every corner of Windsor-Essex has this housing. If one floor living is the goal, geography matters a lot more than it did when you were house hunting in your thirties.
Riverside is the first place I take most downsizers. Post war bungalows on decent lots, the waterfront trail right there for walking, and prices that still come in under the south end. South Windsor has both bungalows and ranches on mature streets with every amenity close by, though you pay for the postal code. Forest Glade is full of single storey homes from the 1970s and 1980s, the streets are flat, and it's quietly one of the better values for this particular move.
East Windsor has the most affordable bungalow stock in the city, so if freeing up the maximum amount of cash is your priority, that's where the math works hardest. Out in the county, Tecumseh and Belle River lean toward newer ranches with attached garages, which appeals to anyone who does not want a project. Amherstburg, Kingsville, Essex and Harrow all carry single storey inventory too, with the tradeoff that you're further from the hospital and the specialists, and that distance starts to matter as the years add up.
Where I'd tell you not to bother looking: Walkerville and the downtown core. I love those neighbourhoods and I sell in them constantly, but they're century two storey and one and a half storey territory. Beautiful staircases in nearly every one of them. Wrong place to solve a stairs problem.
This is the question that actually decides whether your move goes smoothly or turns into six stressful months, and there's no universal right answer. Four ways to sequence it, honestly:
My honest read for most people is option one or option two. Bungalows move fast enough that a conditional offer usually means losing, and bridge financing leaves you depending on a lender saying yes at exactly the wrong moment to discover they won't. Selling first with a long closing is where I land with most downsizers. Before you list, the seven mistakes that cost sellers the most money are worth twenty minutes of your time, because a big family home carries its own pitfalls. And if you want the whole thing laid out step by step, here's how a sale actually runs.
Most people walking through a bungalow are looking at the kitchen. Fair enough. But you're buying this house for the next twenty years, not the next five, so pay attention to a few things that don't photograph well:
I'd rather lose a listing than put somebody in a house that makes their life smaller in the ways that actually count. So here's when I tell people not to do this.
Condo fees can quietly erase the whole saving. A condo looks like the obvious answer for maintenance free living, and sometimes it genuinely is, but $650 a month in fees stacked on top of your taxes and insurance can leave you paying more every month than the house you left. Run the full monthly number, not just the purchase price.
Your neighbourhood might be worth more than the equity. If your doctor, your pharmacy, your church and two of your grandkids are all within ten minutes of where you're sitting right now, moving twenty five minutes away to free up $186,000 can be a bad trade. I have watched that one go wrong for people, and the money did not fix it.
And sometimes renovating beats moving outright. If the real issue is stairs and a bathroom, then a main floor bath and a stair lift might run you $30,000 against the $50,000 in transaction costs you'd spend moving, and you get to keep the house and the street and the neighbours. That math surprises people, and it should come up before anyone signs a listing agreement.
Forty six percent of older homeowners say they intend to stay where they are. That is not stubbornness or a failure to plan ahead. For plenty of them it's simply the correct answer, and any agent who won't say that out loud isn't looking out for you.
I'd rather talk someone into a stair lift and a main floor bathroom than talk them out of a street they love. Freeing up equity only counts as a win if the life on the other side of the move is actually better.
If you're somewhere inside this decision, don't start by touring bungalows. Start by finding out what your current home is genuinely worth in today's market, because everything downstream depends on that one figure. Not what your neighbour claims he got. What comparable homes on your actual street have sold for in the last few months.
Then we look at what one floor living really costs in the two or three areas you'd seriously consider, and we put the numbers side by side with the friction included instead of pretending it isn't there. The picture usually gets clear fast. Sometimes it points at staying put, and that's a perfectly good outcome to arrive at.
One last thing worth mentioning. If your mortgage happens to be renewing soon, that changes the timing conversation quite a bit, and I went through what renewals actually cost in Windsor this year if that's part of your situation.
A free home evaluation costs you nothing and takes very little of your time. I'll pull the real comparables, walk you through what your house would realistically sell for, and tell you honestly whether this move makes sense for you. If it doesn't, I'll say so. Give me a call whenever you want to talk it through.
A data-backed market opinion based on recent Windsor-Essex sales — back in the next few hours.
Whether you’re selling a waterfront estate, buying your first home, or quietly building a portfolio — start with a private call.
