‘After two years of mostly quiet resale housing activity, there’s a feeling that things are about to pick up,’ says CREA official
Ontario home prices stabilized in February, ending a five-month fall that began last summer, figures released by the Canadian Real Estate Association Monday show.
On a year-over-year basis, the average single-family home in the province sold for $947,000 in February, up 2.5 per cent from the average of $923,800 they sold for in February of 2023.
The numbers are seasonally adjusted and do not take inflation into account.
Inflation, depending on what measure you choose, is running at between 3.4 and 3.7 per cent.
“It’s looking like February may end up being the last relatively uneventful month of the year as far as the 2024 housing story goes,” CREA senior economist Shaun Cathcart said in a news release.
“With so much demand having piled up on the sidelines, the story will likely be less about the exact timing of interest rate cuts and more about how many homes come up for sale this year.”
On a provincewide basis, prices for condos in a year-over-year comparison were essentially unchanged, at a .02 per cent decrease, and townhouses were up 2.5 per cent, similar to single-family houses.
“After two years of mostly quiet resale housing activity there’s a feeling that things are about to pick up,” said CREA chair Larry Cerqua.
On a national level, the number of transactions came in 19.7% above February 2023, but CREA cautioned that sales in that month were exceptionally low.
Within Ontario, sales in the north continued to show much stronger growth than those elsewhere in the province – single-family homes in the Soo were up 8.8 per cent year-over-year, and those in Sudbury were up 15.5 per cent.
Locally in the Collingwood, Midland and Orillia area in February, single-family house prices were down 3.5 per cent, condos were down 2.2 per cent, and townhouses were down 4.3 per cent compared to February of 2023, using seasonally adjusted numbers unadjusted for inflation.
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