(Vancouver) Residential property sales and prices continued to slide in December in Greater Vancouver, down 52 per cent and 3 per cent respectively from the same month last year, the region’s real estate board said Wednesday.
A total of 1,295 homes were sold last month, about 20% less than in November and 38% less than the average December sales for the past 10 years, the real estate board said.
For the whole of 2022, sales of residential properties were counted at 28,903, which is 34% less than in 2021 and 7% less than in 2020.
The real estate board attributed the slowdown to the market having had “a year of caution” fueled by rising borrowing costs and a continued fight against inflation.
The compound benchmark price of a property now sits at $1,114,300, down 3% from December 2021 and down 1.5% from November 2022.
The Real Estate Board’s director of data analysis, Andrew Lis, will monitor prices this year to see if buyers and sellers have adapted to higher borrowing costs and finally enter the market.
“As of the end of 2022, the data shows that the Bank of Canada’s decisions to raise the policy rate […] translated into downward pressure on home sales activity and, to a lesser extent, home prices in Metro Vancouver,” Lis said in a statement.