Sec­ond quar­ter prices and sales rise across the country

Reuters

Sales of exist­ing homes in Canada jumped 31.5% in the sec­ond quar­ter from the pre­vi­ous one – their first year-over-year quar­terly increase since before the peak of the finan­cial cri­sis, the Cana­dian Real Estate Asso­ci­a­tion said this week.

The indus­try group said actual home sales totalled 147,351 units in the sec­ond quar­ter of 2009, up 1.4% from the same quar­ter of 2008.

Home sales rose 8.7% in June from May on a sea­son­ally adjusted basis. They were up 17.9% from June 2008, using non-seasonally adjusted figures.

“This is on par with the record for the month of June, set in 2007, and is the fourth high­est ever for activ­ity in any month on record,” CREA said in a report.

A total of 41,304 homes changed hands in the month.

The report is the lat­est piece of evi­dence show­ing that con­sumers are ven­tur­ing back into the home mar­ket, encour­aged by low mort­gage rates and signs that the worst of the reces­sion is over.

“The recov­ery in the Cana­dian hous­ing mar­ket con­tin­ued in earnest in June…” said Mil­lan Mul­raine, eco­nom­ics strate­gist at TD Securities.

“With prices remain­ing quite favourable and low bor­row­ing rates enhanc­ing afford­abil­ity, it is likely that this uptick in sale activ­ity may con­tinue for some time as the recov­ery in the hous­ing sec­tor takes hold,” he said.

The aver­age home price rose 3.6% year-over-year to a record high $326,613 in June.

On a quar­terly basis, the aver­age price was up 0.5% from a year ear­lier to $318,696.

But CREA said strong sales activ­ity in a hand­ful of very expen­sive mar­kets was dis­tort­ing the national aver­age to make prices look unusu­ally high.

Sales growth in Van­cou­ver, Toronto, Mon­treal, Cal­gary and Edmon­ton con­tributed most to the national increase.

The inven­tory of unsold resale homes – mea­sured as the num­ber of months it would take to sell the stock of houses at the cur­rent sales rate – fell to its low­est level since August 2007 at 4.2 months.

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