This is my market update for January 2020.
First of all Happy New Year! It will be a very exiting decade. I am looking forward to have a wonderful decade, I hope you are as well. I will show you January through December 2019, I will compare December 2018 and 2019, and also I will show you the total number of sales that are taken place in your market place for the last 5 years. Also I will show you a benchmark price for the last 5 years as well. Let’s look into the numbers.
We look at January through the end of December, we have sales, active listings, Months of Inventory and Benchmark price. When we started the year market was difficult with 1103 sales in January.
Remember you take the sales divide into the active listings and it shows your Month of Inventory. The Month of Inventory determines the strength of your market in terms of price because it is your supply and demand. Above 6 months – Buyer’s market, between 4-6 balanced, below 4 – Seller’s market.
We started January in a very weak market, Buyer’s market with 9.8 months of inventory. So what happened? Our sales started to go up as they do in the spring market. 1484, 1727, 1829 and look what happened in May 2638, it was the best month of the year. Then June off 2077, July 2231. July was better than June which is a little bit uncommon in some markets, In August 2231, 2333 and look 2858 in the month of October, the best month of the year, that’s unusual as the best months usually are the spring months. That means that the market is getting stronger, 2500 and then we dropped 2016, but that was substantially stronger than 2018 December. Let’s look into months of inventory.
We’ve started with 10 months of inventory. Then went to 7.8, 7.4, 7.8, and then what started to happen, from May we started to fall and we ended the year with 4.3, 4.3 a balanced market. Much stronger where we started, so all of that very good news.
Now look at this! 2018 in December we did 1072 sales, but in 2019 we did 2016, the sales are up 88%. Massive number.
Our market has recovered so nicely from all of the stress testing, foreign buyer’s tax, speculation and vacancy tax, mortgage rates increase. People want to be in Vancouver which is making sense.
Benchmark price just over a million in 2018 and a million in 2019, the prices decreased by 3%, which is not that much, and this is December over December.
Let’s look into Months of inventory. 2017 – purple graph, we started at 4 and finished with 3.5 months of inventory. 2018 the yellow graph, we started right around 4 and we ended at 9.6. What about 2019 the white graph, we started a bit below 10 but we ended at 4.3. Look at how close we are to what happened at the end of 2017, which is the purple graph. You can see the recovery of pricing of our market during 2019, which is very nice.
What about last 5 years? What this is total sales that took place in the last 5 years in our market. 2015 42,326. We started to go down by 5,63 % in 2016, down by 10% in 2017, down by 31.6% in 2018 and we are up by 3% in 2019. So you can see that we went all the time down starting from 2015 and all of the sudden in 2019 we went up. And this is how it starts. It is starts by going up a little bit. It’s like in 2015 we went down a little bit 5%, in 2016 a little bit more and then bam down by 30% in 2018, now we are going right way.
That shows that our market is started to recover. And I think it would be a good year. What about price? In 2015 $700, then we went up by 25% in 2016 to $880, then we went up by 12% to $990, then we went up by almost 9% just over a million and we ended down by 6.5% right around a million dollar. So you can ask why is that the price came down? Because if you look at months of inventory, we started the year with 9.8 months and most of the year we were in buyer’s market until we were close to the ending it became more balanced. So that’s why our benchmark price if we look at the average of the whole year is slightly weaken.
What are my predictions for 2020? I think 2020 would be just fine and the prices will probably start inching back up and I think the sales are going to be more then they were in 2019. Actually, I think we will see significant increase in Sales maybe by maybe 10-12%, that’s gust a guess, but that what I am predicting.