This market is on fire so far this year and, from what I see, it looks like this will continue for the foreseeable future. Prices and unit sales are both up, while listings are way down, leading to an incredibly strong seller’s market!
In the month of February, we saw huge growth in price and in number of sales. January sales were down almost 20%, but February came back with a fury as things opened up. The average sale price rose dramatically to $519,336 and median wasn’t too far behind at $470,000. I will say that these could be skewed a bit by the high demand that was not satisfied by the number of houses on the market in January, so buyers kept looking until more came on the market. If you look at the year-to-date number, a better indicator in this case because of January’s lockdown, we have an average sale price of $490,256 and a median of $446,012. That is an increase of 43.1% and 39.5% respectfully, compared to the same time last year!
Total sales for the year are also up by 6.8% with 235 sales as of the end of February. We have had 271 listings come on the market this year; that is down by 9.7%. We are currently carrying about 115 listings at any given time, down 41.3% from this time in 2020. Median days on market is very low, with the median house selling in 7 days. Let’s not forget that most listings are holding offers for a week or so to get people through them, so that number is artificially high in my opinion.
What does this mean for you? If you own a house, you have probably made a pretty significant amount of money in the past year. Even if you have bought in the last few months, your house is probably worth more than you paid for it, even adjusting for commissions and closing costs. Depending on what your next plan is might determine if this is good, bad or neutral for you. If you want to chat about your situation, let me know!
Where are we going from here? In my opinion, I think this is going to continue for a while yet. Most of the other major markets in Ontario have been seeing this type of market for 5 years now, but it is still pretty new in Lambton. This area has had very low housing prices for a long time and I think so far we have just seen a bit of a snap where prices catch up to where they probably should have been before. I still see more growth happening, at least until other cities start to cool off, but with the pandemic going on, more people are wanting to get out of the city and move to smaller, less expensive communities.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to let me know!