By Ray Clancy – Prop​er​ty​Commu​nity​.com

Res­i­den­tial prop­erty sales in Canada are steady with the lat­est fig­ures from the Cana­dian Real Estate Asso­ci­a­tion (CREA) show­ing that they were 0.1% higher in March than the pre­vi­ous month.

With national sales in each of the first three months of 2011 run­ning close to their five or ten year monthly aver­ages, sea­son­ally adjusted national sales activ­ity in the first quar­ter of 2011 was up 4.5% from lev­els recorded in the fourth quar­ter of last year, and reached the high­est quar­terly level in a year.

Most of the quar­terly increase in sea­son­ally adjusted national sales activ­ity was due to demand in Van­cou­ver and Toronto. Recent changes to mort­gage reg­u­la­tions may have caused a num­ber of sales in some of Canada’s more expen­sive hous­ing mar­kets to be brought for­ward into the first quar­ter that would have oth­er­wise occurred later in the year, CREA said.

Sell­ers look­ing to trade up before changes to mort­gage reg­u­la­tions took effect made their move early, result­ing in a sig­nif­i­cant rise in newly listed homes in Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary of this year. With changes to mort­gage reg­u­la­tions loom­ing in March, sea­son­ally adjusted new res­i­den­tial list­ings for the month dropped 5% month on month.

Steady sales activ­ity com­bined with fewer new list­ings tight­ened the national resale hous­ing mar­ket. The national sales to new list­ings ratio, a mea­sure of the bal­ance between sup­ply and demand, stood at 56.5% in March. This kept the national hous­ing mar­ket firmly entrenched in bal­anced ter­ri­tory, with March mark­ing the firmest read­ing for national mar­ket bal­ance in more than a year, CREA added.

Based on sales to new list­ings ratios, more than half of local mar­kets in Canada could be con­sid­ered bal­anced in March, with two thirds of the remain­ing mar­kets con­sid­ered to be as sell­ers’ markets.

‘The major­ity of local hous­ing mar­kets across Canada are well bal­anced, but not all of them are. Within a province or local mar­ket, the bal­ance between resale hous­ing sup­ply and demand can vary widely and evolve quickly,’ said Gary Morse, CREA’s president.

The sea­son­ally adjusted num­ber of months of inven­tory stood at 5.6 months at the end of March on a national basis. This was unchanged from the pre­vi­ous month. Almost half of all local mar­kets saw the num­ber of months of inven­tory shrink com­pared to the pre­vi­ous month.

Through­out the first quar­ter of 2011, the national aver­age price was skewed higher by strong activ­ity in a few pricey areas of Greater Van­cou­ver. March 2011 was no excep­tion, with an increase of 8.9% year on year.

‘A record num­ber of multi mil­lion dol­lar prop­erty sales in Rich­mond and Van­cou­ver West are push­ing up aver­age prices for Greater Van­cou­ver, British Colum­bia and nation­ally,’ said Gre­gory Klump, CREA’s chief economist.

‘If Van­cou­ver is excluded from the equa­tion, the national aver­age price increase is cut by more than half to 4.3%,’ he explained.

‘Look­ing ahead, evi­dence sug­gests that the poten­tial rush of sales activ­ity in March before recent changes to mort­gage reg­u­la­tions took effect was a story that was largely focused in condo sales activ­ity in Greater Van­cou­ver. This con­firms that the expected impact on sales activ­ity of recent changes to mort­gage reg­u­la­tions will likely be minor over the near term. Inter­est rates are now widely expected to remain on hold until at least the mid­dle of July, which is sup­port­ive for resale hous­ing demand, mar­ket bal­ance and prices,’ Klump added.

———————————————————————————————————————
Con­tact the Jef­frey Team for more infor­ma­tion – 416−388−1960

Lau­rin & Natalie Jef­frey are Toronto Real­tors with Cen­tury 21 Regal Realty.
They did not write these arti­cles, they just repro­duce them here for peo­ple
who are inter­ested in Toronto real estate. They do not work for any builders.
———————————————————————————————————————

Related posts:

1. National home sales hold steady in March
2. Cana­dian prop­erty mar­ket bal­anced as sales increase
3. Recov­ery under­way in Cana­dian res­i­den­tial prop­erty market
4. Cana­dian home sales sta­ble in May
5. Cana­dian home sales rise, prices stable