February 2019 Vancouver Real Estate Market Update

Numbers for Greater Vancouver! Let’s have a look what’s going on. I will tell you the market is very challenging right now. Also at the end, I will show you what’s going on right across Canada in terms of months of inventory. So you would have some perspective what’s happening right across the country. Let’s have a look at the numbers 3 months back. We have December 2018 and January, February 2019. In terms of sales we did 1072 in December, and then went up a little bit in January 2.9% to 1103. But the good news, we jumped 34.5% terms of the number of sales to almost 1500 in February. Now! Active listings! Because again what’s going to happen based on how much inventory and how many sales, is going to give us the months of inventory, which determines the strength or weakness of the market. We had 10,000 active listings in the end of December, almost 11,000 in the end of January, up by 5% and you can see here11,600 sales in the end of February, up by another 7.2%. Here is a good news. If our sales went up by 34% and active listings went up only by 7% that means the Month of inventory dropped. So if we go back in December we had 9.6 months of inventory, January 9.8 up a little bit, and in February we came down by 2 months because you inventory did not go up as fast as the sales went up. That is good news! In terms of benchmark price we are a 1,032 in December, a 1,020 in January down by 1.2% and 1,017 in February down 0.3%. So it’s pretty well remaining the same. So 2015 we did just over 3000 sales. Then we went up almost to 4179 sales, went up by 36%. And then the sales started to drop in 2017, 2018. Obviously, we went through government elections, introduction and the increasing foreign buyers tax, stress testing, mortgage rates increase up to 3 times, speculation and home empty tax. Our sales went down by 41% in 2017 and by 9% in 2018 and down by 33% in 2019. So when we look at those numbers, no matter how we want to spin it, we are down substantially over where we were over last 5 years. Now, active listings, Almost 12000 in 2015, wend down substantially in 2016 as the sales are started to get stronger and stayed around the same in 2017 and 18, but now we up to 11590 which is 48% increase over the year before. So you see sales are down, active listings are up, which gives you more months of inventory. Let’s look into month of inventory and benchmark prices. We know that 2-4 months of inventory is a strong Sellers market, 4-6 – balanced and over 6 months is a buyers market. So in 2015 we had 3.9 months of inventory, 2016 very strong Sellers market 1.7 months, 2017 3.1, 2018 3.5 and in 2019 we moved into completely buyers market. Also you can see the benchmark prices in 2015 – 650 went up by 22% in 2016 – 796, up by 14% in 2017, up by 18% to 1,072 in 2018 and went down by 6% to 1,017 in 2019 February over February. As we continue to move forward here is a breakdown for the sales. 448 sales were detached properties, 759 in apartments, 277 townhouses. Obviously, houses are more expensive, so the are less affordable then condos. Let’s look into months of inventory. It takes 11.8 months to sell a house. and 6,7 months to sell a townhouse. But keep in mind this all can vary. Look at the West Vancouver, it is operating with 18 months inventory, so higher priced houses would have more months of inventory. Apartments have 5.9 months of inventory. That is interesting. Do you remember 4-6 months is a balanced market. So we are still in the balanced market and moving towards the buyers market. But again, certain buildings would have more months of inventory. Townhouses are sitting in 6.7. Here is the benchmark prices of different property types. Detached 1,443,100 apartments $660,000 and townhouses $789,300 I did something different this time. I wanted to compare Vancouver with the Fraser Valley (white rock, surrey, langley, abbotsford, mission, n delta) . It would be cool to see the difference. Months of inventory in detached: Vancouver 11.8 vs 6.5, condos: Vancouver 5.9 vs 4.6 and townhouses 6.7 in Vancouver and 4.5 in Fraser Valley. So gennerally speaking their market is substantially stronger then the market in Vancouver. Again affordability factor! Now I want you to see what’s going on across Canada. We will look again in the month of inventory as it is a determining factor in the market place. It will determine prices going up or down, the strengths of the market. So Vancouver is a big winner with 7.8 on average, Edmonton 7.5, Calgary 6, Toronto 2.6 very good market, ottawa data was not available when I was recorded this and Montreal 5.1 months of inventory. Price wise Vancouver wins again as the most expensive city 941,520. Edmonton 354, Calgary 461, Toronto 780, Ottawa 466 and the data for Montreal was not available.