Photo: Alejandro Luengo/Unsplash
It was a long winter and bumpy spring, but the Vancouver housing market slogged through the frosty conditions and emerged in the summer looking primed for a surge.
The resale market has only strengthened since and in October it delivered the best monthly home sales total seen in the last two years. That impressive result was paired with a price spike that RBC economist Robert Hogue called the strongest sign of a turnaround for the Vancouver market yet.
“Home buyers have more confidence today than we saw in the first half of the year. With prices edging down over the last year and interest rates remaining low, hopeful home buyers are becoming more active this fall,” Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver President Ashley Smith said in a press release accompanying the board’s release of October housing data.
There were 2,858 homes sold in the Vancouver region last month, a 45 percent increase over October 2018’s total. It was also a strong showing even compared to a month earlier, beating September’s sales total by 525 homes for a 22.5 percent increase.
“The recent uptick in home sales is moving us into a more historically typical market,” Smith said in the press release. “Both sale and listing activity is trending around our long-term averages in recent months.”
Arguably, Smith is being a little bit modest about the results. October’s sales total was nearly 10 percent above the 10-year average for the month. While that is still within the “typical” range, it is certainly a great deal better than October 2018’s sales total, which fell nearly 27 percent below the 10-year average.
While prices are still in decline when compared to year-ago levels, the MLS Home Price Index benchmark price for the Vancouver region did see a small gain in October over the previous month, up 0.2 percent to $992,900. The Home Price Index is typically a less volatile and more dependable measure of prices in the region.
And it wasn’t just the Vancouver market that saw its fortunes continue to improve in October. Sales soared well beyond 2018 levels, listings were down and prices spiked in Toronto too, though there were a couple of noteworthy differences between the two markets.
RBC’s Hogue flagged the Toronto market’s drop in home listings as a source of greater concern than the listings decline that Vancouver experienced.
“[The drop in listings] restrained activity and further tightened demand-supply conditions [in Toronto] all at once,” Hogue wrote in a note earlier this week.
“Sellers have regained a lot of pricing power over the past few months in both markets, though Toronto is well ahead of Vancouver in the pricing up-cycle (Vancouver prices are still down on a year-over-year basis).”
