What About the Market?
This high-level summary of the market data might be standing like a scarecrow to keep buyers and sellers out of the field. This main summary is what feeds the headline machines, and if it bleeds, it leads:
Looks alarming right? The problem is, it’s just not very useful data, because the market is much more fragmented.
Months of supply of 3.16 would indicate buyer’s market conditions, but not every buyer will experience that right now.
For example, if you bought a detached home in the west end last month where homes averaged 29 days on market and there is 1.9 months of supply you would have paid (on average) a tiny bit OVER asking price… with many of those homes going into pretty wild bidding wars.
Meanwhile if you had been buying a condo apartment in the Northeast where homes averaged 89 days on market and there is 11 months of supply, you would have got it for (on average) 95% of asking price, with a few lowball outliers going 12-14% below. And that will get worse.
These are the 2 extremes of the market, with everything else falling somewhere in between. But I think you get my point. You need to zoom in to see what’s specific to what you have or what you want.
You also have to zoom out to see the larger context of the market we’re in. We experienced nearly 4 years of insane low supply and price growth, so our current price correction and oversupply might seem dramatic but historically speaking, it’s pretty unremarkable. Supply-wise, we’re about where we were at the end of 2020. In the meantime, prices went up 41%, peaking in summer of 2024, then went back down about 9%, bottoming in December last year. Now they’re leveling off and starting to inch up slowly. I predict things will stay pretty level for the next year or two, with the exception of condo apartments which will see further supply increases and further price declines.
Also: we aren’t Toronto, we aren’t Vancouver, and there’s no such thing as a “Canadian real estate market”.
And if oil stays above $75 a barrel you can throw out any predictions here or elsewhere.
Full report here.
I made this reel to summarize.
