Tuesday, July 31, 2007

July Low-end Market Watch

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.

176 total listings (9 new since July 17)
141 total sales (16 sales since July
17)
sales to listings = 80% (up 6%)
17 taken off market (1 twice)

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

309 total listings (22 new since July 17)
212 total sales (13 sales since July 17)
sales to listings = 68% (down 1%)
46 taken off market

SFH inventory in our segment continues to dwindle. For every new listing in July, 1.16 homes sold. We've been watching this segment very closely and honestly would have gone to check out a few had any of them been deemed viable options for us. The reality is they're not. Back in February, we saw about a dozen potential homes. Today, not so much. SFH are getting more expensive in this segment. We don't see anything priced above $425K. I'm almost willing to bet that if we changed our criteria to $450K we'd see many more properties. That's barely a 6% increase in price, but wow does it ever price us out quickly.

Condos are doing funny things right now. We're seeing prices all over the place. Despite the 68% sales/listings ratio I'm tempted to think that condos in our segment are definitely in a bit of an inventory spike/buyers market. We're seeing one-week price reductions. You can see some signs of rush selling; which is likely a result of needing to close on the next purchase rather than any market-related panic selling. We're also seeing fewer flipped units.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yet again, this week, nothing sold in the higher end section (over 800,000). Nothing.

Anonymous said...

i keep hearing "everyone wants to move here" again and again.

Has the population grown in the last couple of years? Does anyone have any info.

How many people are really coming?

Anonymous said...

We have to take into consideration that there are second home buyers that are willing to pay for lifestyle and beauty.

The rich are getting richer and in turn are pricing out the middle class without realizing (or realizing)

Anonymous said...

"We have to take into consideration that there are second home buyers that are willing to pay for lifestyle and beauty."

There is no evidence to suggest that low-end condos or SFH, or even those $500-$650K SFHs are being bought as second homes by wealthy people. It is locals driving those prices up. We have no one to blame but ourselves.

Wealth is purchasing luxury/waterfront. Not SFH in View Royal and Gordon Head.

"Has the population grown in the last couple of years? Does anyone have any info."

try
here

Anonymous said...

I have a hard time believing the truly wealthy/rich/whatever are buying 600sqft condo's.

Over stretched middle class, baby boomers and other specuvestors I can believe buying those. Generally, those with a good income but lack of sense.

Anonymous said...

hhv,

and what I said above it that nothing over $800,000 is selling. The waterfront is sitting.

I think that those wealthy people are only a very tiny percentage.

oh please said...

VREB stats are out now. Mixed bag.

JMK said...

Yet again, this week, nothing sold in the higher end section (over 800,000). Nothing.

This doesn't really jibe with this month's: "Meantime, 27 sales of over $1 million helped push the average price of single family homes sold in July to another record high of $574,753." Perhaps your search criterium is too restrictive?

Anonymous said...

"The rich are getting richer, and pricing out the middle class ... " Actually, most homeowners in Victoria are the definition of middle class. Thanks to the global equity bubble, their paper assets have recently increased, but that doesn't make them rich.

It's not the 'middle class' that are currently priced out, but rather first-time buyers who can't leverage a ton of downpayment equity off of an existing property. But first time buyers can't be priced out forever ... the market would implode. That's why RE gains such as we've seen in the last few years have tended historically to be temporary.