Monthly Archives: March 2010

House Price Index: January 2010

In January, Calgary prices declined 0.5% from the previous month and are down 9.7% from the peak.    Year-over-year prices are up 1.9% and up 6.7% since the trough date of June 2009.     

Canadian home prices in January were up 7.5% from a year earlier, according to the Teranet-National Bank HPI. January was the 4th consecutive month in which prices were up from a year earlier, after 10 consecutive months of 12-month deflation. The turnaround is due to nine straight monthly increases in the countrywide index. However, January’s 0.5% monthly gain was the smallest so far.     

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Housing (Un)Affordability     

Earlier this week the Conference Board of Canada  issued a report stating  that 20% of Canadian households struggle to afford their homes.     

“The unaffordability tends to affect cities more than rural areas. So anybody that lives in a city is probably at higher risk, especially in cities with buoyant housing markets like Calgary, Vancouver and Toronto,” said Mike Grant, an economist with the conference board.     

“The rate (of unaffordability) in Calgary is somewhat higher than the rate for Canada. It’s one in five for Canada, about 20 per cent, but more like 25 per cent for Calgary.”  (Source: Calgary Herald,  March 31, 2010)     

If you’re interested in the report, feel free to send me an email.

Condo Buyers: New Lenders Condition Alert

If you’re looking to buy a condo and are represented by an agent the following news alert shouldn’t be an issue, but I wanted to pass this on to readers that might be representing themselves.

It has come to AREA’s attention that some lenders may be adding a lender’s condition for review and approval of condo docs by the “insurer” before they will finance the deal.  This is coming to light at the “instructions to solicitor” stage and in spite of any independent condo document review that the client may have as a condition, this is an additional requirement.

You should receive, in writing, a letter from you lender stating clearly that there are no further lenders conditions before waving conditions.  AREA is aware that some deposits have been forfeited as a result of this “surprise” condition.  At this time, AREA is not aware of this being a condition for non-insured deals but it likely is only a matter of time.

In short:

1. Make sure the financing condition reads subject to financing and satisfaction of any/all lender’s conditions.

2. Ask for and receive a lenders full satisfaction of conditions letter before waiving conditions.

3. Do not waive conditions until all conditions have been satisfied.

Or better yet, if buying a condominium have a Certified Condominium Specialist (ahem :P )  represent you in the transaction for some peace of mind.

-

Mike Fotiou
Associate Broker, CCS
First Place Realty

New Housing Price Index (NHPI): January 2010

January 2010 New Housing Prices in Canada

For the 3rd consecutive month, the NHPI registered a 0.4% increase.   It also recorded its first year-over-year increase since December 2008 with a slight 0.1% increase from January 2009.

Source: Statistics Canada

The largest month-over-month increases were:

  • St. John’s (+1.7%)
  • Winnipeg (+0.7%)
  • Toronto (+0.6%)
  • Oshawa (+0.6%)
  • Ottawa–Gatineau (+0.5%)
  • Saskatoon (+0.5%)
  • Calgary (+0.5%)

Statistics Canada reports that in “St. John’s, prices rose as builders reported new 2010 list prices as well as increased labour costs. In Winnipeg and in Toronto and Oshawa, the increase in prices was primarily attributed to higher list prices introduced in the new year.”

Despite the month-over-month increases, many cities (including Calgary) were down year-over-year:

  • Edmonton (-6.5%)
  • Saskatoon (-2.3%)
  • Calgary (-0.6%)
  • Victoria (-7.3%)
  • Vancouver (-1.0%).

“Declines slowed in most of Western Canada’s metropolitan regions as new housing prices were returning to the price levels observed prior to the highs registered at the end of 2007 and the beginning of 2008.”

Source: Statistics Canada

Calgary Million Dollar Sales Statistics

With some discussion on the correlation between the average & median price to million dollar sales, I thought it would be interesting to have a visual interpretation of it.

Below, are the total number of $1M+ sales for Metro-Calgary SFH’s, and its relation to prices.

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With averages, its important to consider not only how many $1M+ properties sold, but what percentage that made up of the total sales. (ie. A million dollar sale will have a greater impact on an average sale price of 10 sold properties than that of 100)

The following graph plots the prices against the percentage that the million dollar sales made up of the total sales for that month.

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As expected, when there is an increase to the percentage of million dollar sales to total sales, there is an increase to the average price.

However, the median price remains relatively unaffected by this since it doesn’t matter whether a property sells for $1 or $10 million dollars, they each have an equal weight in the calculation.

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Example:

5 Sold Prices

$10,000,000
$415,000
$400,000
$250,000
$80,000

Median: $400,000
Average price: $2,229,000

Again, that’s why I prefer the median. It takes care of the upper and lower price anomalies equally.

March 1-7, 2010 Calgary Real Estate Stats

Here’s a quick update for the first week of March with YoY comparisons on a day-to-day basis:

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CONDO

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