Canada real estate sales rise slightly in October

A slowdown in national home sales appears to have lost some momentum last month.

The latest numbers from the Canadian Real Estate Association show sales nationally were up 1.3 per cent month-over-month in October, though non-seasonally adjusted activity came in 36 per cent below the same month last year.

The number of new listings also increased slightly in October, by 2.2 per cent month-over-month.

The Greater Vancouver area also saw sales edge slightly higher last month, increasing six per cent — marking the largest gain nationally.

“We’re really seeing the same thing across all of Canada because there is one driver of what’s going on in housing markets, and that’s interest rates. So in Canada as a whole, we saw home sales up month-over-month seasonally adjusted. They’re still obviously down a lot from 2021. Similarly in B.C., month-over-month home sales are up, but down a lot from where they were last year,” Brendon Ogmundson, chief economist for the BC Real Estate Association, told CityNews.

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However, he says prices haven’t dropped dramatically. He doesn’t see that changing any time soon.

“Prices have come down to around where they were in the fall of last year and I think that’s more or less where they’re going to be over the next year, simply because we don’t have a lot of supply in the market right now, especially in Metro Vancouver where supply has started to plateau and even come down over the last few months,” Ogmundson explained.

The CREA notes the national average price in October 2022 was $644,643 — a drop of nearly 10 per cent from the same month last year.

Prices last month were “heavily influenced by sales in Greater Vancouver and the GTA,” the association adds, calling both markets “two of Canada’s most active and expensive.”

“Excluding these two markets from the calculation cuts almost $125,000 from the national average price,” it said.

In the Vancouver and Fraser Valley areas, Ogmundson says while prices are still off where they were during the peak this year, they are correcting and more or less balancing themselves out.