‘Good for buyers’: home sales for November down

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This article was published 09/12/2022 (1362 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THE scales of Winnipeg’s housing market are almost balanced, according to recent Winnipeg Regional Real Estate Board data.

“Sales are still slightly outpacing inventory, but they’re… trending toward a more normal, pre-pandemic sales volume,” said Jeremy Davis, the board’s director of external relations and market intelligence.

November of 2021 set a record for the month — 1,244 sales. This year, November saw 870 sales.

The drop comes amid rising interest rates and more houses on the market.

“All signs are pointing towards more balance, which is obviously good for buyers,” Davis said.

Over the past five years, average November sales were 1,015. Removing last November from the equation, the average falls to 902 — four per cent higher than last month’s sales.

Meantime, the options for available residential detached houses has skyrocketed 94 per cent this November compared to last.

Davis couldn’t point to a single factor for the jump. It’s likely a mixed bag — people selling their homes because of interest rates affecting their mortgages, folks who waited to sell during the COVID-19 pandemic, a slower selling period, among other reasons.

There was a shortage of housing last November. This year still has fewer listings than the five-year average — 21,580 by the end of last month, compared to 22,887.

“The overall health of the economy, the price of things going up — there’s certainly a lot of different decisions being made by buyers and sellers,” Davis said.

The Bank of Canada raised its key policy rate a half percentage point, to 4.25 per cent, on Wednesday. It’s the highest the rate has been since January of 2008.

In January this year, the interest rate was 0.25 per cent.

Hannah Bassett has watched customers grapple with the rate hikes.

“My clients went from a fixed into a variable (mortgage),” the mortgage specialist said.

She’d dealt with some Manitobans last month whose fixed rate mortgage — at 2.05 per cent — was ending. The variable rate they took was 5.05 per cent.

“I believe they would take that in the hopes that they’d realize some lower rates by the end of their term,” Bassett said.

The average price for a residential detached home was $378,905 in November. It’s up from October’s $377,165, and it’s seven per cent higher than the five-year average.

By the end of November, the year-to-date average residential detached home was $415,325 — up nine per cent from the year before and 11 per cent higher than the five-year average.

“In an economy where price is up on a lot of things, some buyers might be seeing value in the condo market,” Davis noted.

Condo sales — 139 — were up 27 per cent this November, compared to November of 2019. The average condo cost around $267,000.

The WRREB has tracked 14,072 sales this year, up to the end of November. It’s a 20 per cent decrease from last year’s 17,650 and a 2.3 per cent drop from the five-year average.

gabrielle.piche@winnipegfreepress.com