With the weather warming up, so is the local real estate market.
April proved to be a busy month, said David DeDominicis, president of the Brantford Regional Real Estate Association, with 195 homes sold, an increase of 10.8 per cent over March.
The County of Brant saw a decrease of 7.4 per cent in home sales from March to April, while Brantford’s sales rose 16.4 per cent.
“It’s a positive sign that sales continue to increase month over month,” said DeDominicis. “But we need to stress that supply is still a large issue. In April of 2022, we saw 514 new listings. This year, we only saw 360. With prices leveling off, we are seeing positive signs, but there is still work to be done.”
The average cost for local detached homes saw another decrease from the same month last year. Costs were down 18.2 per cent from $922,000 in April 2022 to $753,000 last month.
In April, the average price for a detached home in Brantford was $683,000 and just over $1 million in Brant County.
Homes stay on the market for an average of 29 days. The close price to list price ratio has shrunk significantly, from 116.7 per cent in April 2022 to 99.6 per cent last month. The close price to list price ratio indicates the difference between a property’s listed value and the amount at which it eventually sells.
There are currently two months’ worth of active inventory, a slight increase from the one month of inventory last April. The number of months of inventory is the calculation of the number of months it would take to turn over the current housing supply at the current rate of sales activity.
At a provincial level, residential sales activity reported through the MLS Systems of real estate boards in Ontario numbered 17,306 units in April, down sharply by 13.1 per cent from April 2022.
On a year-to-date basis, home sales totaled 51,505 units over the first four months of the year. This was a substantial decline of 32.2 per cent from the same period in 2022.
The average price of resale residential homes sold across the province in April was $911,078, a moderate decrease of 7.7 per cent from April 2022.
Looking at Ontario’s major urban housing markets in terms of annual price change, Hamilton, London, and Brampton have seen about a 21 per cent year-over-year decrease in average sold prices, followed by Oshawa with a 19.5 per cent decrease and Ottawa with a 16 percent decrease.
Locally, the highest average home prices last month were in Brant County’s Ward 5, which includes Onondaga, Mount Pleasant, Cainsville and Oakland ($1.2 million). That was followed by Brant’s Ward 1, which includes St. George ($1.1 million); Ward 4, which includes Scotland and Burford ($1 million); Ward 3, which includes Paris ($776,000); and Ward 2, which also includes Paris ($681,000).
The highest average sale prices for a home in Brantford last month was in Ward 1 ($793,000), followed by Ward 3 ($720,000), Ward 4 ($708,000), Ward 2 ($635,000), and Ward 5 ($530,000).