The Canadian Real Estate Association is reporting that national home sales are continuing to climb and up 5.1 per cent between April and May of this year.
Sales rose in about 70 per cent of all local markets, including the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), Montreal, Greater Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, and Ottawa.
The actual number of transactions (1.4 per cent above the same period last year) was the first national year-over-year sales increase since June 2021.
“The rebound has been evident for a number of months at this point, but May really drove the point home with year-over-year comparisons for both national sales activity and national average home price back in positive territory,” said CREA Chair Larry Cerqua in a statement. “That being said, the degree to which a recovery will be able to play out on the sales side as opposed to the price side will come down to supply, which remains quite low.”
The rebound doesn’t come as a surprise for Shaun Cathcart, CREA’s senior economist. “The 2023 housing puzzle piece that was less obvious was the reluctance of existing owners to take advantage of a slower market to make a move because they don’t want to mess with the ultra-low fixed rates they locked in during the COVID-19 pandemic,” he noted. “Without existing owners supplying the market with new listings, this housing demand rebound may play out more acutely than might have been expected on the price side this year.”
The number of newly listed homes was up 6.8 per cent in May, but new supply remains at historically low levels. The sales-to-new listings ratio was 67.9 per cent, little changed from 69 per cent in April. There were 3.1 months of inventory, down from 3.3 months at the end of April and down more than a full month from the most recent peak at the end of January. The long-term average for this measure is about five months.
The average home price rose 2.1 per cent between April and May and is now $729,000, up 3.2 per cent from May 2022. This was the first year-over-year gain in this measure in 12 months. As CREA found, the average price recovered by more than $116,000 since January 2023 owing in large part to outsized sales rebounds in the GTA and B.C. Lower Mainland. Excluding the GTA and Greater Vancouver from the calculation cuts almost $150,000 from the national average price.
“
