Here’s my monthly market update for the GTA, Whitby and Oshawa. You can watch the video and/or read the script…

Watch the video here: https://youtu.be/AprilMarketUpdatewithMiiaKelly

Or read the script below:

Hi, it’s Miia here with your April market update.

Industry News

 Obviously, leading up to today, COVID-19 has affected the real estate industry dramatically.

Realtors® are still legally allowed to assist people with buying and selling real estate, but this comes with strong recommendations to ONLY do so if it is essential and to implement several safety measures which have changed the way we assist our buyers and sellers. I spoken about some of those safety measure in one of my videos and blogs last month.

We are now prohibited by the Real Estate Council of Ontario to host and attend Open Houses, but of course, virtual open houses are fine and so you may still see virtual Open Houses being advertised.

 How’s the Market?

So, what happened to the market in March? As the pandemic ramped up, and as the government shut things down, the real estate market adjusted.

If we compare the period of March 1-14 to the period of March 15-31, this is what we see:

• The number of sales: -15.9%
• The number of new listings: -18.4%

In other words, less people were out there buying homes, and less people were listing their homes for sale.

The average selling price dropped as well when comparing March 1-14 to March 15-31, but it was still 10.5% higher than the same period of 2019. For the whole of March, the average selling price was 14.5% more than in March 2019.

So, we started to see prices take a dip in March, but not to lower prices than the prices of last year.

Home prices can take some time to adjust to a changing market because homes are not as fluid of an investment as the stock market, for example. So the next few months will continue to tell us more of the story of the adjustment to home prices as a result of COVID-19 and the recession.

GTA vs Whitby vs Oshawa  

Looking at this chart, we can see that in March, compared to the previous month, that selling prices dipped down slightly in the GTA overall and in Oshawa. Whitby’s prices stayed steady. But again, the next few months will tell us more.

Compared to March of last year, the GTA overall, Whitby and Oshawa all experienced significant gains in selling prices. The market was already hot in the beginning of this year, and if it wasn’t for COVID-19 to slow things down, we may have been headed for a crazy seller’s market like we had in 2017.

Outlook for 2020

Back in February, before we all realized that we were subject to a global pandemic and resulting recession, I reported to you that The Toronto Regional Real Estate Board was predicting that both the number of sales and the average home price will be up by about 10% as of the end of this year.

Will that prediction still hold true?

I think that this will depend heavily on how long this slowdown in our economy will last. If we can recover quickly, then people who have paused their buying and selling activities might catch up all at once in the Fall and home values may recover at the same time. But if we struggle to get back on track for too many months, and we face high unemployment for too long, then the recovery in the number of sales, new listings, and home values may have to wait for another year.

That’s my update for this month. Stay safe out there.

Bye for now.

Miia