April Low-end Market Watch

As promised earlier, here's the brief version of the low-end market watch we've been doing for the past 3 months. If any data we've omitted is important to you, let us know in the comments and we'll get right on it.

Our area of interest is Oak Bay, Victoria, Saanich, View Royal, Esquimalt, and Langford.

Our criteria for houses is under $425K with a suite or suite potential. These are total numbers of listings and sales since late January.

99 total listings (9 new since April 16)
69 total sales (9 sales since April 16)
sales to listings = 70% (up 4% since April 16)
9 taken off market (1 twice?); 1 re-listed and removed again; another re-listed, then sold for over $20K less than original list

Our criteria for condos is 2 bed 1 (or more) baths under $250K. Again, total numbers since late January.

188 total listings (29 new since April 16)
96 total sales (20 sales since April 16)
sales to listings = 51% (up 3% since April 16)
21 taken off market; 5 re-listed

Lots of condos taken off-market in that place I had a tantrum about earlier: 3 of 7 units for sale in that 52-unit building. Also noticing that there are several buildings around town (3 in Quadra/Cloverdale/Hillside 1 in Langford, that have 5+ units for sale in them) could be the work of flippers or the sign of a bad building or just a bunch of people who want to cash out and move on or up. But the competition in those buildings is leading to multiple downward price changes which can only be a good thing for buyers.

I'd hoped that there would be more listings than we've seen in our segment. I'm not surprised in the SFH market because our $425K cut-off doesn't fit well into a $450K split like the condos do. But in the condo market, there are relatively low numbers of units for sale at or around $240K-$250K.

We'd expected that sellers would do their best to get their $260K price down to $249K to bring in a whole other segment of buyers; I'm guessing agents are telling clients they have to go up, not down to attract the buyers still; which seems to be working still. We'll see what happens when some of these units haven't sold in July/August.

It seems the sellers are still cleaning up. For now.