Well, the numbers are in for Vancouver Real Estate Board, let’s have a look at what’s going on. I’ve got some positive news for you, which I did not have for a while, but I feel you’re gonna like what I’m about to say. Let’s have a look at the numbers! So we look at January through May. Number of sale: 1100, 1500, 1700, 1800 and up to 2638. That was a 44 % increase over the month of April. Active listings 11,000 roughly , 11,600, 12,800, 14400 roughly and 14,685 in the month of May. Now, if our sales are up by 44 %, and our listings are up only by 2.3%, Is our market getting stronger or weaker? It’s getting stronger. Because Months of inventory determines the strength of the market. That determines your price, right? Everybody look at the sales, they just want more sales, but what I am interested in, what is the strength of the market place? So you take active listings and you divide sales into it, gives you month of inventory. We had 9.8 months in January, that is a strong buyers market. 7.8 months in February – buyers market. 7.4 in March – buyers market. 7.8 in April – buyers market. 5.6 months of inventory in May – balanced market. We moved into the buyers market, which is very good news. But if you look at the prices they are reliably stayed the same. But what happened over the last few years? We did 4364 sales in the month of May in 2017. We went down to 2833 and we moved up to 2638 in 2019. Let’s look into the month of inventory. 2 years ago, you had 1.9 months of inventory. Crazy busy, strong market. You all experienced that, you remember those days. Then we went to 4, then we went to 5.6 in the month of May. Now why is that we went from 4 to 5.6? Because the rest of 2018 you had a lot of inventory. Remember, we had almost 10 months of inventory in January. So what’s gonna happen is that’s going to cause your months of inventory to be up, and obviously that’s what happened with the prices as well. So, look at this, 968 was the price in 2017. Your benchmark price went up to 1.1 million, which was up by 13 points, and now we’re just right around a million, we’re down by 8 % from May last year. But here’s where I think we got some encouraging news. So this is a line graph, and it shows the trends that are taking place. If I look at 2017, which is a purple line, you can see that the month of inventory sitting over 2 months, and then it went down a little bit, and then all of the sudden, it started to go up just a little. Look what happened in 2018, which is a yellow graph. We started just below 4 months, but all of a sudden it started to go up and up and we ended a year with 9.6 month of inventory. Very, very high. That was a challenging market for many people. Then we started 2019 close to 10 months of inventory, which is a white graph. And I really like how the months of inventory started to decrease from the month of April. And that means that our market is getting a bit stronger. We’ve now moved from a buyers market into more of the balanced market. Will we eventually move back into seller’s market? Possibly, but I do not know at this point. But I think June is a good market for buyers to start being more serious, because once we move to four months of inventory or less, the prices will start to go up. Let’s look into the prices. If you take Vancouver and Toronto over the 10 year period, properties pretty well double. That does not happen in all markets by the way. It’s not happening in Halifax, Calgary, Edmonton. You do not see doubling every 10 years. But in the big markets, where lot of immigrants end up, that does generally happen. That’s why its such a great market to buy in. So if we look into the numbers: 2009 prices were 500,000. So let’s go forward 10 years, prices were 1,1 million. So we went from 500,000 to 1,1 million. Well, that’s a double, isn’t it? Now, let’s go to 2010, 600,000, we went to a million, not quite double, but up pretty substantially over that period of time. So right now, it is a very good time to buy, because your prices have come down. In all fairness, how long do we think prices are gonna decrease in a city like Vancouver? Like, world class city, right? So many people want to live here. So I look at it and say, if I was a buyer right now, if I’ve be thinking about buying a house in Vancouver, I think I’d be probably starting to make the move. And the reason for that is because my trend line is always going the right way. Also I can see that the prices are down, what am I waiting for? Rates are good, trend lines moving the right way, and prices are down from what there were.
