Halton Hills Housing Update - Ep. 185

Hi everyone! Welcome to this week's Halton Hills housing update. So, this is another week of not great numbers, but some really interesting things to go over and definitely showing a trend in terms of where we're going. Looking at Georgetown this week, we had nine sales. That is not a high number, but it's not as low as what we were seeing you know, that last week of August, first week of September. So, nine sales is like, we'll take it. Five of them were a million and over which is a bit of good news, although it is still very slow considering how many properties we have available. Looking at new listings, we had 20 new listings in Georgetown this week which is another huge number. Last week was 30 which was a really huge number, but 20 is still a lot of Georgetown. It’s definitely not the direction we want to be going in.

In Acton this week there were five sales which is quite a bit for Acton. Five is a good number but there were 11 new listings which is a ton of new inventory there. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen double digit new listings in Acton. So, Acton again is feeling inventory rise and it's just kind of sitting in a position that it's never been in with such high inventory. Nothing happened in Glen Williams, no sales, no new listings. In Limehouse there were no sales but there was one new listing and the rural market had no sales but eight new listings. That is a lot of new listings for the rural market.

One thing I want to talk about before we get into active inventory is the expired, terminated, and suspended listings. This list was pretty long last week and it was pretty long again this week too. So, I just want to give you an idea what it is really like. So, I look at these properties to make sure I remove them from the new listing numbers because when I search new listings, it comes up with over 50 which is not accurate because a lot of these properties re-listed, meaning they terminated their listing and made a fresh one. I really go through them because it’s important to give proper facts instead of searching the “easy” way. So, when I did that search this week, there were 25 properties that either terminated or came off the market. When I broke those down, nine of the 25 came back on at a lower price, two came back at a higher price (because the bidding war strategy didn’t work), one came back at the same price (create a fresh listing and be at the top of the search), but what the really interesting thing was was that 13 came of the market completely and a lot of them were in the rural market. Some were in Georgetown and Acton but 13 properties said “no, this isn’t working for me”. So, we’re seeing massive spikes in inventory but because the market is pretty rough for sellers, people are coming off the market. We would be seeing much higher spikes in our inventory if this wasn’t the case.

So, this leads me to this week’s inventory. In all of Halton Hills this week, we are up from 179 to 189 active listings. 193 is the highest number I have seen, and we will likely get there next week. I remember a time in 2019 when we had over 200 active listings in all of Halton Hills but I don’t have records of that. So, since January 2020 we are almost at the highest level I have seen and that is not great news for sellers. Georgetown this week went up from 105 to 110 active listings. So, not a massive jump, but we're definitely climbing. Under 800,000 remain the same at eight active listings and it's a mix of condo townhomes, condo units and a few freehold properties in there. 800 to a million actually took a dip from 19 to 15 active listings, and again, this is our price point that continues to move. Under a million is always busier, so it's not a surprise to see our inventory dropping. The sad news for one to 1.5 million is that we are right back up to some of the highest inventory levels we've seen. I didn't go back in my book and check, but I can recall seeing 53 active listings in the peak of the market in this price point, and so in one to 1.5 million, we're up from 42 to 52 active listings in that price point. So we are super saturated between one and 1.5 million. There are so many properties available, and because those properties don't sell as rapidly, it just keeps piling on. So we are going to definitely start to see prices soften in that price point, unfortunately. 1.5 million plus is down from 36 to 35, so not a huge drop. A couple re-listed lower than 1.5 million but this is generally what we start to see happening. Our higher ticket stuff starts to get saturated, stops moving and then it slowly trickles down to the lower part of the market. Those are the properties that start to feel the pinch in terms of pricing a lot sooner.

So, looking at our other markets, Acton is up from 26 to 29 active listings. That is the highest number I've ever seen in Acton. Almost 30 listings is crazy for that market. So, things are still selling. Glen Williams remained the same at six. Limehouse is up from three to four and the rural market hit 40 active listings from 39 this week. I have never seen the rural market hit 40. Inventory is basically at an all time high in all of our markets and I really think it’s only going to get higher. Georgetown has been at 140 before and I’m sure we’ll get there eventually, especially if properties stop terminating.

So, not a great update for sellers, especially this week. If you have a buyer that is willing to offer on your property, you need to really consider what that looks like because there's not a lot of buyers willing to offer and the pricing is just going to soften from here. We just heard also this morning that inflation rate was at 4% which is another little kick because they’re more likely to raise interest rates next time there is an announcement. For buyers, it's a good time to be thinking about getting your pre-approvals in place and starting to dip your toes in the market because there might be some better deals to be had because of the softening in prices.

So, I will be back next Tuesday. Have a great week, everyone.