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Houses continued to sell fast and furiously throughout November, with the demand from homebuyers outpacing supply once again. Any thoughts of a housing market correction has been proven to be just that - at least for now.
While many home buyers are rushing to make their purchase with their time limited pre-approved mortgage commitments in hand, more are jumping into the market in fear of increased interest rates next year, which of course would leave them with less buying power.
It appears that the most desired gift this year has Santa wishing for the days of the cabbage patch doll craze.
A new record was set for the month of November, with a total of 597 properties sold. This was however just a mere 4 units more than what sold in October, but is so much more than the seasonal decline we traditionally see.
But is the housing market softening? With the average price for all properties sold at $821,969, this represents a large increase of 28.9% over the average of all properties sold in the same month in 2020, but it also represents a decrease of 2% from October. So what gives?
A decline in the average price may at first seem like we are seeing a softening market, however, as you will see coming up in the breakdown of homes styles and units sold for each, there has been considerably more smaller units sold such as condos and townhouses, and far fewer larger units sold, such as fully detached homes. It would stand to reason that the average sale price of all units would decline, so the fact that we have only seen a 2% difference is actually quite amazing.
Taking a look at the break down of the types of residential properties sold, there were 324 detached homes sold through the month of November, which is 3.9% fewer than the number sold in October. The average sale price was $990,447 - which although is technically a little bit less than the average in October, it is likely due to an increase of smaller, detached homes as well as those lacking updates or modernization coming to the market.
There were a total of 106 Condo Apartments sold at an average price of $494,548. Which is a jump of $30,000 in one month!
There were just 30 Semi-detached homes sold in November at an average price of $717,143.
Last but not least, there were 136 townhomes sold - which is 21.4% more units sold than in October, with an average sale price of $693,324.
With most properties still being sold in an offer presentation format, whereby all offers are presented at once after a set number of days, the average number of days for all houses to get from list to sold definitely does not represent how quickly buyers would like to scoop up a house. In November the average number of days stayed at 10 days.
Just how fast are homes selling? Kitchener Waterloo set an all low record of just 0.3 months of inventory, marking the thirteenth consecutive month where the inventory was less than 1 months worth.