| We see some news articles recently talking about the housing bubble. One of the articles showed charts of decreasing sales volume in Greater Vancouver. Indeed, according to Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver, home sales had decrease 30.8% in March 2017 as compared to the record-breaking number seen in March 2016.
But the one sided number didn’t show buyer demand versus supply.
Demand for homes continues to outpace supply in Metro Vancouver
When we look at sales volume as compared to total inventory in sales-to-active-ratio, we see that the market is reviving in townhome, condo and now even single family home markets. The real estate markets had slowed down dramatically over the winter. For detached homes, the sales-to-active-ratio even reached buyers’ market during the winter but now we are starting to see buyers coming back into the market.
The sales-to-active-ratio for Single family homes in Richmond and Burnaby South had increased and started to reach seller’s market again despite dropping to buyers market over the end of last year (see below charts).
In addition, MLS® HPI Benchmark Price for single family home in Vancouver West seemed to increase slightly over the last month (see below).
What I’ve learned over the years is that markets always go up and down. And it always goes up more than it comes down.
A veteran real estate agent said, unless we face some natural disaster or war, it is unlikely to see large price drops. If you are buying for the long term, it is always good advice to buy real estate and wait rather than wait to buy real estate.
All these statistics are general and covers many different neighborhoods. There are also many different ways of looking at the data and interpreting them. If you look at smaller areas, the data points may not be enough to reflect correctly the market condition.
So I think if you want to learn a market, go to open houses, look at a lot of them and talk to real estate agents. I think it is the best way to know how a market is doing instead of believing one hundred percent in news articles. And I’ve learned that predictions are just educated guesses.
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