Luann Lasalle – The Cana­dian Press

Home buy­ers can expect more choice and lower prices in the sec­ond half of 2010, while sell­ers can expect fewer offers for their homes, says one of Canada’s lead­ing real estate brokers.

“Accu­rate pric­ing is going to be really key,” said Phil Soper, CEO of Royal LeP­age Real Estate Services.

In its lat­est hous­ing sur­vey, Royal LeP­age said yes­ter­day the real estate mar­ket will start to slow in the sec­ond half of 2010 with the num­ber of sales expected to fall com­pared with the hot activ­ity early in the year.

“I would say if you’re a seller, the first thing you should expect is fewer mul­ti­ple offers on your home,” Soper said from Toronto.

Sell­ers who try to squeeze extra money out of their homes will likely have their homes “lan­guish” on the mar­ket, unless they’re excep­tional prop­er­ties, he said.

“I believe we are through the highly volatile spik­ing of prices and activ­ity lev­els, both up and down,” Soper said. “We’ll see a much a more sta­ble, but frankly less excit­ing in a good way, real estate mar­ket in the next 18 months,” he said.

Soper said a lot of buy­ers were frus­trated by a tight sup­ply and “overex­u­ber­ant com­pe­ti­tion,” par­tic­u­larly in the first quar­ter, but that’s eas­ing with increased listings.

In the first half of this year, about half of real estate trans­ac­tions were from peo­ple who were look­ing to buy a home, but weren’t nec­es­sar­ily sell­ing one, he said.

“It took a while for sell­ers to get com­fort­able that the recov­ery from the reces­sion was real. We had an all-time record num­ber of new homes come on the mar­ket in the first quar­ter of 2010. It started to impact prices in the sec­ond half (of 2010).”

Soper also noted that “fis­cally aware 20-somethings,” espe­cially women, are now much more inter­ested in buy­ing homes than they were in the past.

Royal LeP­age said some mar­kets will see a decline in home prices and sales vol­umes toward the end of 2010, but they should be seen more as a reflec­tion of the highs reached late last year rather than a major slowdown.

Prices for detached bun­ga­lows and two-storey houses were up about 9% in the April-June quar­ter, com­pared with the same time last year. Con­do­mini­ums were up 7.3%.

Royal LeP­age is fore­cast­ing that by the end of 2010, home prices will rise an aver­age 6.8% over last year, while the num­ber of home sales will increase by just over 1% from 2009.

Van­cou­ver and Toronto showed some of the largest increases in the sec­ond quar­ter of 2010.

Aver­age prices in Van­cou­ver were up 16.6 to 19.1% while prices in Toronto rose by an aver­age of 7.7 to 11.4%.

How­ever St. John’s, N.L., had the country’s biggest increase with prices up an aver­age of 18.4% to 9.6%.

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