Halton Hills Housing Update - Ep.204

Hi everyone! Welcome to this week’s Halton Hills housing update. It has been a hot minute since the last time I did my market update. The last one was on February 6th and the following week, Matt and I welcomed twins into our family, so we are officially parents to four kids! It has been a crazy few months, with one of the twins and I spending the first six weeks in Hamilton in the NICU. To say it’s been a bit of a roller coaster since they joined us would be an understatement, but we’ve been home for a few weeks now and life is starting to get back to normal. As many of you know, Matt is a stay at home dad so he will be able to stay with the twins while I’m back at work. We’re super happy that everyone is home and healthy and I am happy to be back to my market updates. So, speaking of those, I will not be doing a re-cap of everything I’ve missed because that would be too much, but I am going to start almost from scratch and talk about what’s been going on in the market! I have been watching it, but obviously not as close as I had been. Lastly before we get into it, I want to thank Mackenzie who works with me for holding down the fort when I was not physically here to do so! 

So in Georgetown last week there were 12 sales, which is a good number for Georgetown and shows that the market is moving. There were 22 new listings which is quite a few and things have definitely shifted since my last update in February. Back then, the market was kind of quiet with listings and that is definitely not the case anymore. 

Acton had two sales and four new listings last week. There were no sales and no new listings in Limehouse and Glen Williams, and the rural market had four sales, (which is a high number for the rural market), and six new listings. Inventory is starting to come on and we’re seeing people who tried to sell in the Winter re-list their houses now. The overall consensus right now is that it feels like a good climate to be putting your house on the market. A few things to note - out of all of the sales last week, only one of them sold over asking. We are seeing properties moving pretty rapidly, but we aren’t seeing the chaos of people offering hundreds of thousands more than the list price. We aren’t in that market and I honestly don’t know if we’ll ever be in that market again. People are more cautious right now, especially given the interest rates, but only one house selling over asking is a good indicator that the right product may have some competition, but we are still in a spot where you can negotiate. The only thing that is really changing is that you have to make decisions a bit quicker because of how fast properties are selling. So, we’re not in a crazy market right now but if interest rates were to drop or if inventory stopped coming on to the market as rapidly, we could get to that place. 

Another thing to note is that when I looked at the expired, terminated, and suspended listings of last week, there were nine properties that dropped their price and re-listed lower. That is another indicator that we are still in a buyer’s market. Sellers are not in a leverage position. When I left in February, we were starting to see sellers have the leg up because inventory was so low. That has sort of flipped though, so things have really changed. Four listings also decided not to re-list their homes, probably because they weren’t getting the results they wanted, and then four people re-listed at the same price to freshen up their listing and to move to the top of the Realtor.ca search page. When we are in a really hot market, there are maybe two to four properties that make changes to their listings, and this week we had 17. That just further supports that we are not in a seller’s market. Of the nine properties that re-listed lower, there were a few of them that dropped their price by $100,000 - $200,000 and are now holding offers. I’ll let you know next week how that strategy works for them. 

Looking at active inventory now, when I left in February, we were at 94 active listings. We are now up to 167 listings. So, in the two plus months that I’ve been away for, we have seen inventory almost double. I didn’t think this is what our spring would look like because we were sitting pretty low in February but the market is really strong right now. Anything over 150 is a pretty high number for Halton Hills and we could get into another situation where buyers start to hold off to see what will happen because there are so many properties. 

In Georgetown this week, there are 90 active listings, which isn’t insanely high, but also isn’t low. It’s middle ground where things are moving well and inventory is neither over saturated or scarce. So, looking at our price points, under $800,000 has only six active listings and $800,000 to one million has twelve. So in total, of the 90 listings, only 19 of them are under a million dollars. These are still our price points that move the most because more people can afford them. If you have a house to sell in this pocket, now is a good time to do so! Our million plus price points are the big conversation this week. One to 1.5 million has 40 active listings which is pretty high. When we got to the peak we were in the high 50s, but 40 is still quite a few. In February, we only have 18 listings here, so we have more than doubled our inventory. Our 1.5 million plus price point is back to being completely over saturated. We had a nice nine listings in February, and I really thought people were starting to be realistic with their pricing, but now we have 32 listings there. There are a lot of people trying to get big money for their properties and again, buyers just aren’t here for it. We are seeing more properties sell for over a million dollars, and over half of the sold properties last week were over a million, but over 1.5 million is still uncommon. 

Acton has 25 active listings this week which is pretty high for them. Anything over 15 is busy for Acton. Six of them are over $1,000,000, but the far majority are still under. There is alot available here but it tends to move slower when there is more inventory available in Georgetown. Glen Williams has eight active listings this week and they are all over two million dollars, so you need big money to move there right now. Limehouse has three active listings and the rural market is up to 41. We were at 28 in February and 41 is an extremely high number for the rural market. 

Overall, the market seems to be moving pretty well right now if you are pricing your house appropriately, especially if it is under $1,000,000. I obviously have years of data from these updates, but this is a new baseline for me since taking a break. I really appreciate everyone who reached out saying “hey I haven't seen your videos in a while, I hope you’re okay” and am happy to be getting back into the swing of things!

I’ll be back next Tuesday, have a great week!