At least for the condo and townhouse market.
Last month, we felt the market picking up after a quiet month in August. After school started in September, buyers also started looking and buying again.
“Fewer home sales are allowing listings to accumulate and prices to ease across the Metro Vancouver housing market,” Ashley Smith, REBGV president-elect said. “There’s more selection for home buyers to choose from today. Since spring, home listing totals have risen to levels we haven’t seen in our market in four years.”
This is good news for home buyers. Now buyers can have the proper due diligence period to do home inspections and make sure they can get financing from banks. In previous year, or even the beginning of this year, buyers often have to make subject free offers to have a chance at winning the bid. Meaning buyers have to waive home inspections and financing clauses to be even considered by the sellers.
Bob Rennie, the Vancouver Condo King, while promoting the development his company markets, remains optimistic of the real estate market. He said now buyers don’t have to rush to buy. And the number of jobs that are going to be created by companies like Stemcell Technologies and Amazon will bring more workers to the area.
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The sales-to-active listings ratio for September 2018:
A new townhome development our client has been looking at has sold about one home per day for the past 3 weeks. Builders are still buying single family houses to build.
Having been a real estate agent for almost 10 years, I’ve seen market much slower than this.
The real estate market always goes up and down. Just know why you are buying and make sure you are okay with the ups and downs of the market. Generally, housing price in Vancouver go up first and go down last while price in suburbs go down first and go up last but every area is different. Feel free to contact us for a stats report specific to your local area.
Below the HPI price index for Metro Vancouver housing, all property types since 2005:
