According to The Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA), national home sales were little changed in November compared to October, though prices have increased nationally over the past years.
Here are the highlights:
National home sales edged 0.1% lower from October to November.
Actual (not seasonally adjusted) activity was 5.9% above November 2012 levels.
The number of newly listed homes rose 1.8% from October to November.
The Canadian housing market remains in balanced territory.
The national average sale price rose 9.8% on a year-over-year basis in November.
The MLS® Home Price Index (HPI) rose 4.1% year-over-year in November.
“Tightened mortgage regulations, combined with the recent increase in the five-year mortgage rate, have affected housing markets differently depending on their location,” said CREA President Laura Leyser. “Because all real estate is local, your REALTOR® remains your best resource for understanding how the housing market is shaping up where you live or might like to.”
The actual (not seasonally adjusted) national average price for homes sold in November 2013 was $391,085, an increase of 9.8 per cent from the same month last year. The size of year-over-year average price gains continues to reflect the decline in sales activity last year in some of Canada’s larger and more expensive markets which caused the national average price to drop at that time. Removing Greater Vancouver and Greater Toronto from national average price calculations, the year-over-year increase is more than cut in half to 4.3 per cent.
The number of months of inventory is another important measure of balance between housing supply and demand. It represents the number of months it would take to completely liquidate current inventories at the current rate of sales activity. There were 6.0 months of inventory at the national level at the end of November, unchanged from one month earlier. As with the sales-to-new listings ratio, the current level of the months of inventory measure indicates that the Canadian housing market remains well balanced.
“Most housing markets are in balanced market territory, including in many large urban centres where sales are below peaks reached earlier this year,” said Klump. “On balance, current trends provide more evidence that the Canadian housing market remains well behaved while interest rates remain low.”
Want to read the whole story and review the statistics? Here’s the link to CREA.
~ Steven Fudge, the purveyor of canadianrealestatehousingandhome.ca and proprietor of urbaneer.com, a division of Bosley Real Estate Ltd., Brokerage
