Quebec mortgage distress filings just hit a five-year high

In June, Quebec lenders registered 564 préavis d'exercice: the legal notice a creditor must file before it can seize a property or force its sale. That is the highest monthly count since the Registre foncier du Québec began publishing the series in January 2021. It may be the closest thing Canada has to a public, property-level early-warning gauge of mortgage distress.

The data comes straight from the Registre foncier du Québec, the provincial land registry, which publishes monthly counts of every legal act registered against real property. The Princeps analytics team worked through the full series (every region, every month since 2021) together with Bank of Canada rate data, to map where mortgage stress is actually building and what a renewing household faces.

What a préavis d'exercice actually is

Before a Quebec lender can take a property back, whether through prise en paiement (taking in payment), vente par le créancier (sale by the creditor), or vente sous contrôle de justice (court-supervised sale), it must register a formal notice and give the borrower at least 60 days to respond. That notice is the préavis d'exercice.

Most préavis never end in a forced sale. Borrowers refinance, sell on their own terms, or catch up on payments. That is precisely what makes the series valuable: it measures the start of trouble, not the end of it. Court-ordered sales and repossessions are lagging indicators; the préavis is the earliest formal footprint financial stress leaves in a public record.

The level shifted in 2023, and it never came back down

The step change is unmistakable, and it is important to read it honestly. Filings did not creep up gradually as mortgages renewed. They jumped almost 50% in 2023, the year the rate shock hit variable-rate borrowers and the first post-pandemic renewals, and then settled onto a plateau roughly 65% above the cheap-money era. The last twelve months averaged 483 filings per month, against a 2021–22 average of 295.

What is new in 2026 is not acceleration (the first half runs only about 1% ahead of 2025) but the level at which the plateau is holding, and the fact that June just printed the highest single month in the series:

One month is one month; July's data will show whether it holds. But a series high, arriving in the same year the largest wave of pandemic-era mortgages comes up for renewal, is worth explaining rather than ignoring.

The renewal arithmetic, from the Bank of Canada's own series

Two Bank of Canada rate series bracket what a renewing household actually faces.

The Bank of Canada's weekly effective household interest rate, a blend of the rates households actually pay rather than the posted sticker, sat at 2.57% in June 2021. As of late July 2026 it is 4.86%. The posted 5-year conventional mortgage rate moved from 4.79% to 6.09% over the same window. But posted rates are sticker prices, and most borrowers negotiate well below them. The effective rate reflects what households actually paid, so that is the series used here.

Run that spread through a standard Canadian mortgage (semi-annual compounding, 25-year amortization, renewing after the initial 5-year term):

A household that stretched to qualify in 2021 is now finding an extra ~$400 a month, per $400K borrowed, at renewal. The registry cannot prove that this is what drives each filing; a préavis does not say why a borrower fell behind. What it can show is that distress filings reset to a five-year high exactly as this arithmetic began applying to the largest renewal cohort in Canadian history, and that they show no sign of returning to their old level.

Where the distress is, and where it isn't

The provincial total hides a sharp geographic split. Comparing the last twelve months against the 2021–23 average, by administrative region:

The pattern is clean: distress is concentrated in Montréal and its commuter belt, the regions that saw the most aggressive pandemic-era price growth and investor activity, while the Québec City region, whose market stayed cheaper and steadier, is actually filing fewer préavis than it did during the cheap-money years. Whatever is happening here, it is not a uniform provincial malaise. It maps onto who borrowed how much, and when.

(Smaller regions like Côte-Nord, Gaspésie and Abitibi file in the single digits monthly; we exclude them from percentage comparisons because the base is too small to be meaningful.)

The exit door is narrowing at the same time

The same registry records every sale. Counting only true sale acts (ventes), the market's trajectory looks like this:

The 2024–25 recovery stalled and went into reverse: the first half of 2026 is running 4.6% below the first half of 2025, and 39% below 2021. This is the registry-level confirmation of the Quebec slowdown that national forecasters have been citing all summer, and it matters for the distress story, because the standard escape from a préavis is selling before the lender does. A slowing resale market narrows exactly that door.

What this data can and cannot say

These numbers are only useful if you know their edges.

• The registry counts acts against all immovables, not just homes. Commercial and industrial properties are in these totals. The registry does not publish a residential split.
• A préavis is a warning, not an outcome. Most are resolved without a forced sale. This series measures stress entering the system, not homes lost.
• June is a single data point. The honest headline is a plateau at a five-year high with a new record month, not a spike.
• Recent months can only revise upward. Late registrations mean June's 564 is a floor, not a ceiling.
• One of Quebec's 17 administrative regions (Nord-du-Québec) is absent from the publisher's series.

What to watch next

The registry publishes monthly, so July's count will show whether June was noise or the start of a second leg up; we'll revisit the numbers when it lands. Nationally, CREA's next forecast revision arrives August 18, and if it again names Quebec as the drag, the numbers above are the ground-level mechanics behind that call.