An average price is a real number that answers a question almost nobody is asking. It tells you what every property type in an area sold for, added together and divided. It does not tell you what your house is worth, and it does not tell you what the next one will cost.

King City and Vaughan in July 2026 show the problem clearly.

The headline figures

In King, 20 properties sold in July 2026 at an average price of $2,028,099. The median was $1,770,000.

In Vaughan, 272 properties sold at an average price of $1,144,631. The median was $1,065,000.

Read only those two lines and you would conclude that King costs roughly 77 per cent more than Vaughan. That conclusion is wrong in both directions, for two separate reasons.

Reason one: the average includes property types you are not buying

Vaughan's $1,144,631 blends detached houses, semi-detached houses, townhouses and condominium apartments into a single figure. Most move-up buyers in Vaughan are shopping for one of those four, not the blend.

Detached houses in Vaughan tell a different story. There were 124 detached sales in July 2026 at an average of $1,558,242, with a median of $1,392,500.

So the gap between the Vaughan headline number and the Vaughan detached number is roughly $413,000. If you are selling a townhouse and buying a detached house inside the same municipality, the headline average conceals the entire size of your move.

In King, detached houses averaged $2,492,714 across 14 sales, against the all-types average of $2,028,099.

Comparing detached to detached, King averaged about 60 per cent more than Vaughan in July, not 77 per cent.

Reason two: twenty sales is a small sample

King recorded 20 total sales in July 2026, of which 14 were detached. Vaughan recorded 272 total sales, of which 124 were detached.

With 14 sales, two unusually large transactions move the average materially. With 124, they do not. This is why King's average and median sit so far apart. The average detached price was $2,492,714 and the median was $2,050,000, a gap of roughly $443,000. The average is being pulled upward by the top of the market.

In Vaughan the same two detached figures were $1,558,242 and $1,392,500, a gap of about $166,000 on a much larger sample.

When the average sits well above the median, the average is describing the expensive end, not the middle. In a market like King, where estate lots and acreage properties trade alongside more ordinary houses, that happens routinely.

The other number nobody quotes

King's sales-to-new-listings ratio in July 2026 was 20.8 per cent, against 36.7 per cent in Vaughan. Months of inventory stood at 11.6 in King and 4.9 in Vaughan.

That is the more useful comparison for anyone deciding where to buy or how to price. It says that in July, King had roughly two and a half times as much inventory relative to its pace of sales as Vaughan did. Properties in King took 55 days to sell from their most recent listing date and 71 days from first listing, against 34 and 54 in Vaughan. Sellers in King achieved 94 per cent of asking price on average. In Vaughan the figure was 97 per cent.

How to use this

When you read a price figure for your area, ask three questions before you do anything with it.

1. Does it cover my property type, or all of them together?

2. How many sales is it built on?

3. How far apart are the average and the median?

If the answer to the first is "all of them", the second is a small number, and the third is a large gap, you are looking at a figure that will not survive contact with your actual house.

None of this means averages are useless. It means they are a starting point for a conversation, not the end of one.

Before you fall in love with anything

Text me at 647-931-5151 and I will show you the sell-first math on your own numbers, in your own neighbourhood, before you start looking.

Danny Macedo, Macedo Real Estate Group, Royal LePage Supreme Realty, Brokerage. Selling in Toronto and York Region since 1996.

All figures in this article are taken from the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board Market Watch report for July 2026, released on 6 August 2026. Averages describe a whole area over a single month. They do not describe your house.