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More tightening of the local real estate market in January led to a 15 per cent drop in home sales from the same month last year, but the price of single-family homes continued its record-setting ascent.
“The buyers are there, but we’re seeing increased competition for properties, and that’s what is driving the price up,” said Kathy Dawson, president of the Huron Perth Association of Realtors. “If we have less product to sell, then sales will decline, but there’s still the same numbers of buyers.”
While 91 units were sold in January, there were two different stories playing out on the price side, Dawson said. The benchmark price for single-family homes was $437,200, a jump of 27.7 per cent on a year-over-year basis. By comparison, the benchmark apartment/condo price of $413,500 is down 4.3 per cent from year-ago levels, and continued a decline that started last spring.
“Buyers are preferring the detached single-family home,” Dawson said. “When the pandemic started, people were highly seeking single-family homes rather than condos or apartment-style homes, especially an apartment style going into a building with elevators and sharing living space with other people. People are getting past that now, and it’s starting to improve again.”
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The average price of homes sold in January 2021 was a record $510,695, an increase of 25.3 per cent from January 2020 and the first time the average price was more than $500,000 in a month.
The dollar value of all home sales in January was $46.5 million, up 6.6 per cent from a year ago and a record for the month.
There were 102 new residential listings in January, down 29.7 per cent from last year. This was also the lowest number of new listings added in the month in history.
Active residential listings numbered 114 units at the end of last month, a significant decline of 62.6 per cent from the end of January 2020 and the lowest for the month in more than three decades.
Months of inventory numbered 1.3 at the end of January 2021, down from the 2.9 months recorded at the end of January 2020 and below the long-run average of 6.5 months for this time of year. The number of months of inventory is the number of months it would take to sell inventories at the current rate of sales activity.
“I see a lot of the same (moving forward) because sellers are not moving unless they absolutely have to,” Dawson said. “It’s so hard to find a place, but there are still people who need to move.”
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