Spring is in full swing! Yes, yes the weather is beautiful but I'm talking about the real estate market. Sales & new listings both improved this month - the gap between them came a little tighter to support some monthly inventory gains. I am working with a few buyers and I'm having flashbacks to the constant multiple-offer situations that we went through last year. Even with some more listings coming on, these March inventory levels are still the lowest since 2006. So yes, we are still deep in seller's market territory. This is pushing prices up and the pace of price growth has been stronger than we expected. Positive net migration rate is adding more demand to the table and there is just not enough supply to keep up with everyone looking for homes. Let's see which property types are seeing the most action!
DETACHED
The market for detached homes continue to favour the seller. There has been a steep pullback in sales because there have been fewer listings and increased lending rates. This is the only property type where activity has dipped below long-term trends. Sales were better than February but almost 50% lower than last year. Inventory levels also fell by 30% compared to last year so the market is tight. And a tight market pushes prices upward. Most of the new listings that came to market are priced higher than $600,000, so it is slim pickings for buyers looking for detached homes priced under $600,000.
SEMI-DETACHED
Like a poem that rhymes, the semi-detached home market rhymes very much like the detached home market. Sales & new listings improved a small bit on a month-to-month basis, but both are much lower than last year's levels. As you can see, this pushed the sales-to-new-listing ratio up to almost 78%. It is an even tighter market for properties under $600,000. Higher lending rates have forced some purchasers to shift their focus from searching for detached homes, to semi-detached homes but the grass is not that much greener here. Low supply + high demand = recipe for higher prices. Benchmark price of a semi-detached home pushed up over 2% from February, and is 5% higher than March of 2022. Even with notable price gains last few months, the benchmark price is still 0.58% shy of our peak in May 2022.
ROWS & TOWNS
All about the gains here. Benchmark price, sales, new listings, inventory levels all improved compared to the previous month. Was it enough to keep up with the growing demand for townhomes in Calgary? Not really. Despite month-over-month improvement, inventory levels are still 36% lower than last year. It is still a strong seller's market, with 1 month of supply. You guessed it - benchmark price went up; it pushed to $378,100. This is almost 8% higher than same time last year, and set a new monthly record high. The areas that saw the most price growth were South and NE districts.
APARTMENTS
It felt like forever but the tight market conditions have finally trickled over to the apartment sector. Sales activity was down about 11% and with only 1000 apartment listings available this month the months of supply was kept quite low, at 2 months - seller's market territory! The benchmark priced pushed up to $293,500, almost 3% up from last month an about 11% higher than March of 2022. Most of the apartment sales this month were priced between $300,000 and $499,900.
All property types are seeing strong seller's markets. Seems like a pretty good time to list your property if you ask me...so do that. Call me ;)
Source: creb.com
