April 21 Market Update

MLS numbers update courtesy of the VREB via Marko Juras. These numbers are for the Victoria Real Estate Board's reporting area, including Sooke, Shawnigan Lake and the Gulf Islands.

	April 2015				April  2014
	Wk 1	Wk 2	Wk 3	Wk 4
Unconditional Sales	102	264	479		664
New Listings	223	561	879		1521
Active Listings	3758	3870	3894		4404
Sales to New Listings	46%	47%	54%		44%
Sales Projection	--	726	810
Months of Inventory					6.6

Real lack of new listings coming on out there.   Last year at this point we had somewhat fewer sales (436) but quite a few more listings (1073).    A year ago sales flagged a bit and I thought maybe it was the beginning of the end of the trend of YoY improvements, but here we are a year later with no sign of it stopping yet.

Happy April

Well maybe 734 people last month earn $100k in Victoria.   Or maybe it's a big debt orgy. 

Well it just got a little harder with CMHC raising rates by 15% (about $2700 extra for the average Victoria home), which we can expect to continue as the government fights to keep the housing market from boiling over.   Doubling the TFSA contribution limit plays into this as well by encouraging people to invest in things other than real estate.   Of course the tax on zero is still zero.  

A good month for the home market in Victoria though.  At 5 months of inventory we're solidly in balanced market overall, but as we know from Just Jack's finer analysis, this is only the average of a pretty hot core and a languishing westshore.   

That trend of improving market shows no sign of stopping yet.

Sales up 22% YtD over last year.  Even though I guessed the highest it looks like I was far too pessimistic in my yearly sales forecast.