This is my Market Update for September 2019. I would like to show you what is happening with the market. Also I want to compare July and August of last year with July and August of this year. And at the end, I will show you all sales in total for the last 5 years and I will do a prediction for the last 1/3 of this year. Let’s have a look at the numbers. Her are the sales from January through August and we did 2231 sales in the month of August and 2557 in July. So we down by 12.7% in sales. You might think this is bad news, but August is typically slower than July. Because many people going away for vacations and children are getting ready to school and parents helping them to do so. Not many people are shopping for homes in the month of August.
Let’s have a look into month of inventory, which is the strength of our market. It has nothing to do with the number of Sales. Month of Inventory determines when Sales divide into Active listings and you get the Month of Inventory or in other words – Supply and Demand. So again 4-6 months – Balanced market, Below 4 months – Sellers, above 6 months – Buyer’s market. So we started the year with 9.8 months of inventory and in August we had 6 months of inventory. So from January to April we were in the Buyer’s Market. Then we jumped in the Balanced Market in the month of May, back into the Buyer’s Market in the month of June and now we are sitting in the Balanced Market for the last 2 months.
What is happening with the prices when the market is Balanced? Not much. In August we had $993,000 and in July $995,000, so the prices are not changing that much.
Let’s compare August of this year with August of last year. We did 2231 sales in August this year and we are up by 15,3% over the August of 2018. So if we compare August and July of this year the sales are dropped, but they are up by 15,3% if we compare august of this and last year. If we look into the prices, we were just above 1 million in August 2018 and we are a little bit below a million in August 2019. The prices dropped 8.3%. Actually, the prices dropped below 1 million last month and that was for the first time in many years.
Let’s look into the graphs that shows our Month of Inventory or Supply and Demand. 2018, orange line, we started with 4 months of inventory, which is Balanced Market, and we ended the year with 9.6 Months of Inventory, which is totally Buyer’s market. 2019, white graph, we stated the year with 9.6 Months of Inventory, and then we trended down and now we are just a little bit below where we were in the month of August 2018. I do not know what is going to happen next, but I suspect that we will be below the yellow line, which means our Supply and Demand would be Balanced. It does not mean that we will have more sales, it just means that our market is balanced.
Let’s look in those numbers.
If we look in July 2018 we did 2070 sales and this year in July we did 2557. Which is very good news. August last year we did 1929 sales and August this year 2231. Let’s look into Months of Inventory. 5.6 months in July 2018 and 5.9 months in July 2019. 6.1 in August 2018 and 6.0 in August this year. So we see how the numbers are slightly improving year over year.
Here are the sales for the last 5 years. Let’s have a look! Everything in white is an accurate data and in yellow is what we think is going to happen. So , 2014 we did 33,116 sales, in 2015 – 42,326, in 2016 we had 39,943 sales, in 2017 we did 35,993 24619. You can see a bit drop from 2017 to 2018. That was because the government implemented so many rules and regulations – Speculation Tax, Foreign Buyer’s Tax, Mortgage Rates increases, Home Empty Tax and so on. But what we are projecting for the last 1/3 of this year – the market would be stronger with more sales 6304 compare to 6241 in 2018. Because the months of July and August was stronger this year compare to same months in 2019. We think that the whole year will complete with more sales.
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