Average price decreased for the second time in as many months, dropping by 3.5% from $1,299,984 in March to $1,254,436 in April. How do we make sense of this figure? Well, it’s down 6.0% from the “peak” in February but still up 8.3% from December. And if you want to look at individual TRREB districts, you’ll see that, despite the 3.5% drop, the City of Toronto is still up 2.0%, while Halton, by comparison, is down 8.7% on a month-over-month basis. Ah, yes, the law of averages at work! Year-over-year, the average home price is up 15.0% from $1,090,414 last April. Imagine that – a mere $1,090,414? A lot changes in a month, but even more changes in a year.
Sales declined rather surprisingly from the month of March; 10,955 down to 8,008, a drop of 26.9%. However, it might surprise you to know that sales also dropped from March to April in 2021 as well. Year-over-year, the drop was even larger: from 13,613 sales in April of 2021 to 8,008 this past month, a decline of 41.2%. Excluding the 2020-pandemic year, these 8,008 sales are the fewest in the month of April since the 7,744 posted in 2018. Prior to that, you’d have to go all the way back to the 8,107 posted in 2009. It was an odd month for sales, to say the least, although most of that decline took place in the suburbs of the GTA.
New listings also declined on a month-over-month basis, from 20,038 in March to 18,413 in April. That’s a modest 8.1% drop, although it’s still well ahead of the 14,147 new listings posted in February. If we do see the market becoming more balanced, we’d expect new listings to increase dramatically. But the figure is still off on a year-over-year basis, having seen 20,841 new listings in April of 2021, which puts the 18,413 figure recorded last month at an 11.7% decline. With sales down 26.9% and new listings down 8.1%, it seems to reason that active listings should be up.
Active listings increased by a whopping 28.8%, month-over-month, which is a direct result, as noted above, from the decline in sales outpacing the decline in new listings. We saw 10,167 active listings at the end of March compared to 13,098 active listings at the end of April. Year-over-year, the increase isn’t quite as dramatic, with those 13,098 active listings representing a 12.3% increase over the 11,668 recorded in April of 2021. In next Monday’s blot post, we’ll look at the “absorption rates” in each of the major TRREB districts: Toronto, Halton, Peel, York, and Durham to see if there are some areas that are weaker than others, and where we think the market will go as a result.
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