Halton Hills Housing Update - Ep.199

Hi everyone! Welcome to this week's Halton Hills housing update. So, we're going to jump right into what happened during the first week of January. Looking at sales this week, Georgetown had eight sales, which is a nice indicator for the market. Eight is not super high, but it's very on par with a normal “ish” week and it's definitely up from the slow weeks we saw through December. So eight sales, that’s a pretty good start to the new year, I would say. There were only eight new listings. That means that sales and new listings are in line, so we won’t see a spike in new inventory, and we actually had a bunch of properties come off the market again, so inventory will actually be down. It’s the same story we’ve been seeing for the past few months. In Acton this week, we had no sales but two new listings. Glen Williams and the rural market saw no sales and no new listings. When we look at the properties that have terminated, expired, and suspended this week, there were ten properties that came up. Of the ten, two of them re-listed at a lower price, and eight of them didn’t come back on the market. I really didn’t think that this is a trend we would continue to see into the new year. If this trend continues, we may have an inventory crisis again, because our sales are in line with our new listings, and properties are still terminating, so inventory keeps dropping. I'm very invested in what is going to happen with inventory here because if we start to see sales really pick up, it's going to flip again, and with supply and demand, there won’t be enough supply since demand always picks up again in the new year. We could be in for a busy market and I think this may be the last time for a while where you could get a good deal on a house right now because if inventory continues to drop, we will see bidding wars again and prices will go up. 

All of Halton Hills is down from 112 active listings to 109. We are getting really close to the 100 mark, and a couple more weeks of properties exiting the market and we will be in a very low inventory situation. In Georgetown this week, we are down from 60 to 56 active listings. Our lowest inventory last year was in May with 53 listings, and May was a really busy month with our highest average price of 2023. It was also the month that was most comparable to 2022, so it will be interesting to see how the numbers pan out, because we really need inventory to come back up again. Looking at our price points, under $800,000 is up slightly from 11 to 12 listings. Only one of those is a freehold property, and the rest are condo townhouses and apartments. Those are moving but I think some of them are still priced too high. Now, $800,000 to one million is down from 16 to 13 active listings. There is not a lot available there and this is our busiest price point. There are quite a few Delrex area bungalows that are available and I think that these are the types of properties that once they increase in price, everything else in town does too. To only have 13 listings available in this price point is honestly concerning and I think it will cause the market to get busier. One to 1.5 million is down slightly from 21 to 19 active listings. This price point only starts to get busy when the lower markets are too. This is still a relatively high number, although it’s nowhere close to the 60 we saw before. Then the stale price point is 1.5 million plus. It stayed the same at 12 active listings this week, but there are virtually no sales happening over 1.5 million lately. It’s almost impossible to find a buyer with that kind of budget right now and I think it will be a while until it picks up again. 

In Acton this week, we went from 18 to 20 active listings. Glen Williams went from seven to six and Limehouse stayed the same at zero. The rural market also stayed the same at 27 listings, but these start at 1.4 million dollars, which shows why there isn't a ton of movement in this market. It’s a very expensive mortgage and the cost of borrowing is extremely high right now. 

So, that’s a snapshot of the start of January. I would say that a positive is that we saw a good number of sales in Georgetown, but a negative is that inventory is still dropping with properties coming off the market and not re-entering. This market could very easily flip in the coming weeks and could turn in favour of sellers again. I think there is still a lot of buyer hesitation, but the cost of borrowing is high so that makes sense. It will be interesting to see what happens at the next rate announcement, which I believe is happening on January 24th. I don’t think rates will go up, but I’ve heard speculation that they will go down. I had a client this week who is closing at the end of January tell me that their rate has gone down almost a full percent since buying it in November. They’re getting a fixed 5.49 which is something we haven’t seen in a while. As rates start to soften again, it gives people buying power, which is a factor that leads to the price of housing going up if there isn’t enough inventory to satisfy demand. It’ll be interesting to see but I don’t think the market will go back to where it was in October. So, we’ll see what happens. I’ll be back next Tuesday, have a great week!