Housing prices depend on interest rates, employment, population growth, construction volumes, government policy and credit conditions. Each of those is difficult to forecast on its own. Together they are not forecastable with any useful precision, and the people who do it for a living revise their numbers regularly.

That is not a reason to be paralysed. It is a reason to stop looking for a prediction and start reading the conditions, which are measurable, current and available to you.

There is also a practical test you can apply to anything you read about the market. Does it tell you what the numbers are and where they came from, or does it tell you what is going to happen? The first is information. The second is content.

One more thing worth saying plainly, because it applies to this page too: an article with a month in its title is a snapshot, and a snapshot is out of date almost immediately. This page has no month in its title and no figures in its body for that reason. It is intended to still be correct in two years.

Here is the problem in one sentence: the average sale price changes when the mix of homes that sold changes, even if not a single home changed in value.

Imagine a month in which condominium sales are unusually active and detached sales unusually quiet. The average falls. Nothing has become less valuable. The composition of what transacted simply shifted toward smaller homes. The reverse happens too, and a handful of unusually large sales can lift a monthly average on their own.

The median helps a little by removing the distortion from extreme sales, but it has the same underlying problem: it still describes the homes that happened to sell.

What solves it is a constant-quality index. Organized real estate publishes a home price index that tracks a defined benchmark home with consistent characteristics over time, so that movements in it reflect changes in value rather than changes in what sold. If you want to know whether homes like yours have gone up or down, that is the measure to use.

The practical instruction: when a headline quotes an average price, treat it as a description of the month's transactions rather than as a statement about values, and go and look at the index instead. This single habit will make you better informed than most people reading the same coverage.

What the word means. A recession is a significant, broad-based contraction in economic activity. There is no single universally agreed definition, and the shorthand most often quoted in the media is two consecutive quarters of declining gross domestic product. That shorthand is a rule of thumb rather than an official test, and the formal dating of business cycles is done after the fact rather than in real time.

Why it does not translate directly into house prices. Housing responds to the things that determine whether people can and will buy: interest rates, employment, household income, credit availability, population growth and how much supply exists. A recession affects several of those, but not all in the same direction and not at the same time. Falling rates and rising unemployment pull in opposite directions, and which dominates in a particular market is a question about that market.

The honest position: a recession makes some outcomes more likely and none of them certain, and knowing that one has been declared tells you much less about your own transaction than the five numbers in section two do.

What the word is often doing in practice is carrying emotion rather than information. If you find a piece of coverage has changed how you feel about a decision without changing any number you can look up, that is worth noticing before you act on it.

A regional figure blends detached homes with condominiums, renovated with original, and every municipality in the region with every other. In York Region it blends the north end of Richmond Hill with the Highway 7 corridor, and those behave differently.

Three things narrow a market figure into something you can actually use.

Housing type. Detached, semi-detached, townhouse and apartment are separate markets with separate buyers, and they frequently move at different speeds and sometimes in different directions.

Geography, at the level that matters. Municipality is better than region, community is better than municipality, and where a school boundary drives demand the effect is street-level rather than neighbourhood-level. Our guide to Richmond Hill neighbourhoods sets out why comparing across a boundary misleads in both directions.

Price band. Entry-level housing and the top of the market often behave independently, because they draw on different buyers with different constraints.

At the end of all that narrowing, the honest limitation: in a small area, over a short period, there may be too few sales to support any conclusion at all. An agent telling you a specific street is up or down on a handful of transactions is reading noise. The correct answer in that situation is that the sample is too small, and anyone unwilling to say so is not being straight with you.

Buy on what you can carry, not on what you can be approved for. Those are different numbers and the gap between them is where people get into difficulty. Ask your mortgage professional what the payment looks like at a higher rate than the one you are being quoted, and decide whether you would still be comfortable.

Think about how long you intend to stay. Transaction costs are real, and a short holding period is the thing that makes short-term price movements matter. A buyer planning a decade is exposed to this very differently from a buyer planning three years.

Understand what you give up when you waive a condition. Waiving financing is the largest single risk available to a buyer, because a pre-approval is not final approval on a specific property. Our complete guide to buying in Richmond Hill covers the conditions in detail.

Compare against matched comparables, within the same boundary, and ask for the listing history on each: what it originally listed at and how long it took to sell. That history is where the negotiating room is, and a summary without it is an opinion.

Accept that you will not time it. Nobody does this reliably, including people who do it professionally. Buying a home you can comfortably carry, in a place that suits your life, at a defensible price, is the decision available to you. Timing the market is not.

1. Reading the average price as a statement about value. It describes what sold, not what homes are worth. Use a constant-quality index instead.

2. Applying a regional figure to a specific property. Housing type, community and price band all need narrowing before a number means anything to you.

3. Drawing conclusions from too few sales. In a small area over a short period there may be no conclusion available, and the honest answer is to say so.

4. Comparing one month to the previous month. This market is seasonal. Compare to the same month in previous years.

5. Confusing the policy rate with a fixed mortgage rate. They are priced differently and do not move together reliably.

6. Waiting for certainty. It does not arrive. Decide on what you can carry and how long you intend to stay, both of which you can know today.

7. Taking a forecast as information. If a piece of coverage tells you what will happen rather than what the numbers are and where they came from, it is content. Treat it accordingly.