(Toronto) Toronto’s housing market slowdown continued to fade last month as home sales rose from May 2022 and prices approached pandemic highs.
The Toronto-area real estate board found home sales were 9,012 in May, up 25% from a year earlier and up 20% from April.
The Real Estate Board’s chief market analyst, Jason Mercer, took the figures as a sign that demand for homeownership had picked up markedly in recent months, after many potential buyers pulled out, when interest rates were raised eight times in a row by the Bank of Canada.
However, sellers still seem to be expecting higher prices and have not started putting their homes up for sale as quickly as buyers have returned to the market.
Still, the May data also showed that supply was not keeping up with demand, as the number of new listings was still well below its May 2022 level.
New listings last month totaled 15,194, down nearly 19% from a year earlier.
The average selling price of a home in the Greater Toronto Area reached $1,196,101 last month, about 1% lower than in May 2022. Still, this is an increase of almost 4 % compared to April.
The composite benchmark price fell 6.9% year over year in May, but rose 3.2% on a seasonally adjusted basis, compared to April.
Increase in Vancouver
Residential property sales in Greater Vancouver rose 15.7 per cent in May from the same month last year, the area’s real estate board said Friday.
Vancouver’s housing market is showing signs of warming as summer approaches, the chamber said, as prices rose for a sixth consecutive month.
Sales for the month came in at 3,411, down 1.4% from the 10-year seasonal average of 3,458 units.
The benchmark compound price for all residential properties in Metro Vancouver was $1,188,000 last month, down 5.6% from May 2022, but up 1.3% compared to April.
New listings for sale totaled 5,661 last month, down 11.5% from a year ago and down 4.3% from the seasonal average over 10 years, which is 5,917 new registrations.
Andrew Lis, director of economics and data analysis at the real estate board, said in a statement that prices were rising because there were more buyers than sellers in the market, limiting the resale housing supply.
Lis said May’s uptick in sales, close to historical averages, was a “surprising twist” amid higher interest rates and a slowdown in new listings.
“If mortgage rates weren’t dampening market activity so much right now, I think our market would look a lot like the peak of 2021-2022, or even 2016-2017,” he said.