Covid-19 has come into our lives and it’s made our life very uncertain for many of us. Let’s have a look at the last 90 days in Vancouver!
You can see January Sales 1,571, went to 2,150 in February and to 2,524. We were shaping up for a very nice spring market, weren’t we? Now, in all fairness, the first 2 weeks of March were pretty good, and then the Sales, actually started to die off the last 2 weeks, because Covid-19 became a very big deal. And the number of Sales in March would have been substantially bigger, if it wasn’t for that.
Let’s look at Active listings and at Month of Inventory. You can see we get 8,617 active listings with 5.5 Months of Inventory. In February we had 9,195 with 4.3 Months of Inventory. March, 9,606, went to 3.8 Months of Inventory. Look what started to happen to our Months of Inventory. We are moving into much stronger market, from Balanced market towards the Seller’s Market. As we are moving into the stronger market the prices are starting to slightly go up and we were up by 1.3% in March over the February.
Let’s compare prices year over year. Here is January 2019 and 2020. In sales we were up by 42.4%, which was nice to see. If we look at February, we had 1482 in 2019 and 2150 in 2020, the sales were up by 44.9%. Have a look at March, the Sales are up by 46%. So as Inventory going down, Sales are going up and the Prices started to go up and we saw increase of 2,2% in March over February, which is nice to see.
Let’s compare the first 90 days of 2019 and 2020. We had 4,314 sales in the first 90 days in 2019 and we did 6,245 sales in the first 90 days in 2020, which was an increase of 45%.
Think about this, if the last 2 weeks of March had been normal and no Covid-19, it would have been up substantially more. So, I guess, what I want to say here is what’s going to happen as we go forward? Well, first of all, I think we can all agree that the Sales in April are going to be off quite a bit. How far, we do not know yet, but I will report about that next month. But here is what I do know! Even with this going on, there are still people who are going to buy and sell Real Estate. There is a reason why Real Estate been called an essential service. Some people just have to sell and have to buy.