Halton Hills Housing Update - Ep.144

Hi, everyone! Welcome to this week's Halton Hills Housing Update. So, the trend of low sales and high new listings is continuing, but so many houses are coming off the market, which is kind of skewing the numbers. Let’s get into it!

In Georgetown last week, we had seven sales, which is a pretty low number for Georgetown, and we also had 14 new listings. That should mean that our inventory is rising, but when we talk about the numbers, you will see this is not the case, and it’s the same in all the markets we are looking at. In Acton this week, we had three sales, which is great news for Acton. Again, they had a very rough few months there where we were seeing practically no sales in Acton, but over the last few weeks, we've seen them picking back up again. It’s mostly their lower ticket products, under $900,000, but it’s good to see some sales happening there again. There were five new listings in Acton, so some new things to see there. Glen Williams, Limehouse, and the Rural market all had no sales last week. Glen Williams had one new listing, Limehouse had none, and the rural market had two.

So now what I want to talk about is the terminated and expired listings that are exiting the market and not relisting. What I do each week for these updates is look for properties that updated as expired, terminated, or suspended, and when I look at the new properties that week, I remove these because they are not new. They are properties with price changes or reslists to freshen up, so I don’t want to skew the numbers by including them. So, where I’m going with this – Last week there were 21 properties that fell in that terminated, expired, etc. pocket. Of the 21, only seven of them came back on the market. That means that 14 properties, terminated or expired and completely went off the market. So, despite the fact that we are seeing new listings outpace sales, when we have 14 properties coming off the market, that is keeping our inventory very low. It’s what I’ve been talking about when I refer to the properties that skew our numbers. We should be seeing inventory rising, but that’s just not the case, so things are staying pretty stable.

In Halton Hills this week, we are down to 151 from 154. Looking at Georgetown, we were at 92 last week and are down to 90 active listings. So, despite a huge gap between sales and new listings, our inventory went the opposite way that it should. Looking at active price points now -  Under $800,000 went from 13 down to 11, $800,000 to a million is up slightly from 17 to 18 active listings, one million to 1.5 million, they saw a big drop this week and a bunch of those 14 that came off were in this pocket. So last week, they were at 36, and we're now down to 32 active listings in that price point. We have been feeling such a saturation in this price point, and I think people just aren’t getting anything close to what they want based on people living in the past and what they’re neighbors were getting earlier this year. 1.5 million plus remained the same at 29 active listings. We have a ton of inventory in that pocket but there's just not a lot of buyers willing to buy properties there right now. It's a lot of money, especially at today's interest rates.

In Acton this week, inventory remained the same at 24 active listings, Glen Williams remained the same at eight, Limehouse is down slightly to four, they had one of the terminations, and the rural market remained the same this week, also at 25 active listings. So, I hope that these numbers sort of give you a snapshot into why we're seeing such a stable market in terms of our numbers. Normally in November and December, we start to see new listings slow down by around the third week of November and December's very slow for listings. But, then we have buyers still active in the market. They usually sort of buy up the inventory slowly through November, December and we typically go into January with very low inventory levels. You might remember last January, there was at one point 11 active listings, and I believe it actually went down to 9 at one point. Active listings in all of Georgetown and Halton Hills was at 34, So that just shows you what it's normally like going into a January. I mean, last year was exceptionally low but we usually go into January with relatively low inventory. I'm interested to see what happens here with the market through the next, you know, 60 days. Normally, we will see listings slow down but we will still see buyers active. If we see listings slow down and buyers completely stop, we're going to at a standstill. Another interest rate hike might be coming though, so that might keep buyers moving along. It’s going to be interesting. We haven't followed a lot of our normal trends for the last three years, so let's see what happens. But that's where our numbers stand and that's why we are not seeing a huge amount of inventory rising, because people are just taking their properties off the market and that's keeping things kind of cool. So anyways, it's just interesting to me. Lots of talking about numbers today. I will be back next Tuesday, have a great week!