Home Sales In Toronto Have Dropped But Average Price Still Up
The prices of homes in Toronto have continued to decrease in December, but the same slump does not apply to anything from tiny condos to detached homes that have backyards. They were still high, actually higher than they were on average last year than they were in booming 2016, the Toronto Real Estate Board stated.
All housing prices had an average of $735,021 in December, showing an increase of 0.7 per cent up from $730,125, from last year. This information was provided by Toronto Real Estate Board not long ago.
However, during December price was down by 3.5 per cent fro the November’s median price. Also the median selling price for all of 2017 was $822,681 that indicates a 12.7 per cent increase from the year of 2016.
At the same time in Toronto, there were still active listings and it had an increase of 172 per cent from the year before. This was suggesting that sellers were planning on selling their property before new stress test mortgage lending rules came into effect on January 1st.
The Canadian real estate board stated that cities like Ottawa and Queen’s Park have also set up some new rules and regulations, that includes a foreign buyers’ tax introduced in April of last year. That came along with more supply of new listings in the second half of the year, this lead to the slow price growth.
Last year in the Greater Toronto Area, the overall sales fell by 18.3 per cent compared to the record pace set of 2016.
Jason Mercer, the Toronto Real Estate Board’s director of market analysis said “Certainly buyers moved to the sidelines to see how things would shake out.”
In addition, this past December was the seventh month in a row in which the benchmark price index has been dropping, it is down by 8.9 per cent since the month of May. The board notes that this is the largest seven month decline in the history of data going back 2000.
Although the sales in Toronto indicated signs of recovery in December, it dropped by 7.1 per cent from last year to 4,930. That’s the smallest decline since the foreign buyers’ tax was levied. In the first quarter of 2017 there were record sales, then came a decline in the next two quarters before the sales went up again in the last months of the year.
Mercer stated that “It is interesting to note that home price growth in the second half of 2017 differed substantially depending on market segment. The detached market segment, the most expensive on average, experience the slowest pace of growth as many buyers looked to less expensive options.”
Finally there were 92,394 sales through its MLS system in 2017, it dropped from 113,040 in the previous year.
