The supply of homes for sale in the Sarnia area soared to 374 units in October, finishing the month with more than double the number from a year earlier.
That invention marked a return to more balanced local real estate market following recent years when few homes were for sale and the area was experiencing an extended seller’s market.
“Active listings haven’t been this high in the month of October in more than five years,” said Rob Longo, president of the Sarnia-Lambton Real Estate Board.
Longo said the “magic number” is enough listings for a three-month supply of inventory.
“We’re just there, basically, at 2.9 months,” he said. “It’s giving everybody a little bit of breathing room and taking a little bit of pressure off.”
The median number of days homes were on the market locally was 21.5 in October, and they sold for nearly 97 per cent of their asking price.
While the median year-to-date local home price last month – $492,555 – was down slightly from the month before, it remained more than 13 per cent higher than in October 2021, Longo said.
“Although our local market has not entirely escaped the recent downturn, we seem to be weathering the storm very well when compared to other areas of the province that are experiencing a far more severe decline in sales,” he said.
Nationally, a slight increase in sales volumes last month was accompanied by a decline in prices. The MLS Home Price Index fell by 1.2 per cent on a month-over-month basis and 0.8 per cent over the same month in 2021. The actual national average home price was $644,643 in October 2022, a drop of 9.9 per cent from the same month last year.
Housing prices have been falling in parts of the country since the Bank of Canada began hiking interest rates earlier this year in an attempt to bring down inflation.
“The (Greater Toronto Area) and some of the bigger centres, they’re seeing prices have declined somewhere between 25 and 30 per cent,” Longo said. “We haven’t seen anything near that.”
Locally, there has been fewer real estate transactions at the “higher end” of the market with properties priced at “north of $1 million,” Longo said.
“It’s not that the current interest rates are unsustainable or that they’re unaffordable, it’s just that people don’t have the certainty of when” the increases in rates will end, Longo said.
He anticipates another interest rate increase this year but expects them to level off in the New Year.
“I think we’ve done through the worst of it now,” Longo said.
The number of sales recorded locally in October was 128, according to the board’s monthly report.
That’s a dip of nearly 17 per cent from October 2021.
Last month’s local real estate dollar volume of $60.8 million fell more than 18 per cent from October 2021.
The year-to-date local dollar volume in October was down 13 per cent to $733.2 million.
With files from the National Post