We saw some things change this month, while some trends stayed the same. If you watch any amount of real estate news you’ve probably seen a huge variety of headlines such as “The Prices are Exploding”, or “The Market's Crashing”, but keep in mind those are all over the place and they're often about all of Canada, or at best maybe about Calgary. In these updates, we're only looking at what we’re seeing right here in Airdrie, AB.
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Market Statistics Overview
We had 144 sales in September, this is down a lot from August where we had 204 sales. Now, a big portion of this is the seasonality of our market, we’ll always see less sales in September than August, but this seemed like an excessive drop. They were down nearly 30% from month to month, so I went back the last 10 years and pulled what the average sales drop has been from August to September.
What I found was not only was this the biggest sales drop we’ve seen from August to September, and by quite a large margin, but the average was only about 8.5% less sales in September than August. This is showing us an uncharacteristically slow month within a year that has been very busy. Now of course this is only 1 month, so we can’t call it a trend, but I needed to point that out because there’s definitely something going on there.
Moving onto our new listings where we saw 204 new listings within month. Basically the same amount of new listings as the month before, and unlike sales, its fairly common to see similar listing numbers in September as compared to August. With low sales and consistent listing numbers, that brought our inventory in Airdrie back up over 200 listings to start October with.
This is where we can see why one month of low sales doesn't mean a whole lot to our overall market just yet, because though that did push us over 1 month of supply, where we’re now at 1.39 months of supply, we’re still within a technical sellers market.
Pricing
Our bench market price right now is 8.2% higher than at this time last year. For detached homes, we did see our prices increase again this month, up another 0.38% and now up to a benchmark price of $605,800. The month to month increases are slowing each month right now, but we still are increasing.I should mention that the detached category is the only style of home that’s fairly close to moving into move of a balanced market, with a month of supply of 1.81 month. There’s a Reasonable chance that by next month we could be talking about detached homes being in a balanced market. Moving onto the semi-detached homes or duplexes. Prices here are up 0.82% over last month now at a benchmark price of $474,200. With a month of supple exactly at 1 month, you can expect the increases to continue for the semi-detached homes into the winter.
Now onto the townhomes, where we saw another price increase of 1.6% this month, up to a benchmark price of $352,300. In the townhomes we’re still working with below 1 month of supply, right now at just 0.91 months.
Lastly, the star of 2023 real estate in Airdrie, the apartment style condos. Up another 2.1% this month for their prices, now at a benchmark price of $258,200. With the biggest price increase, its no surprise that we have the lowest months of supply here, with just 0.8 months of supply for condos in Airdrie currently.
So again this month, prices increased across the board here in the city. The more affordable product is still out-performing the detached homes, and that will likely continue for the foreseeable future.
In terms of price ranges, starting first with the $0-$300,000 price point. Here we saw 18 sales in September, and we currently have 17 active listings. So, we’re seeing just under 1 month of supply in this range. Even though this is still in the extreme sellers market range, it's up quite a lot over last months 0.38 months of supply in this price range.
Moving on now to the $300,000-$500,000 price range. Here we saw 55 sales in September, and we currently have 43 active listings. Which translates to a month of supply of 0.78 months, so it’s a bit more aggressive of a sellers market in this range.
For the $500,000-$700,000 range we saw 56 sales in September, and we currently have 72 active listings. This gives us 1.28 months of supply, which is nearly double what we saw last month in this range where we only had 0.6 months of supply.
In the $700,000-$900,000 range we had 10 sales within September, but we currently have 51 active listings! So our months of supply has doubled in this price range as well, and puts this range not only not in a sellers market, but all the way through a balanced market and into the early staged of a buyers market now.
Lastly we have our over $900,000 price range, where we saw 5 sales in September, and we currently have 19 active listings. Here we’re just under 4 months of supply, which is right in the middle of a balanced market.
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Overview
Well, we saw a slowdown in September, there’s no denying that after we work through the numbers and it’s pretty easy to see that it wasn’t just a typical seasonal slowdown either. So what is it? Is the market shifting? Is it just a one month blip in activity?
I think we have a couple factors at play here. One, we know that a lot of our buyers here the last couple years have been from Ontario & BC right? I find at this point of the year most people from those provinces are telling me that they want to wait until the new year as they do NOT want to move in the wintertime and I actually hear this more from out of province buyers than I do from local Airdrie buyers.
Our second factor is that we have fixed interest rates which just went up again. This I find has a greater effect on the actual activity levels in the market than the bank of Canada changing the variable rate. Up to this point the interest rates hasn’t effected us much, just due to the amount of people moving here, but with those fixed rates on the move right at the time of year when those buyers are already thinking about waiting, I find it’s pushing even more of those out of province buyers to hold off until the new year.
So, I think there’s a fair chance that we see lower activity levels through October, November, and December. If we get to 2024, and especially if fixed rates don’t go up to much more, I think we can expect another early spring market to come our way in the new year. Slowing down doesn’t necessarily mean prices go down, but just the increases slowing a bit like we saw this month.
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- Brad Walker
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