Halton Hills Housing Update - Ep.227

Welcome to this week's Halton Hills housing update! I have September's unofficial numbers as well as what happened last week in Halton Hills, so let’s take a look! In September of 2023, our real estate market was really suffering. Our average price was $1,083,000. The bad news is that our average price year over year is down, but I’m not totally surprised as September wasn’t a very strong month for us. So, this year, September of 2024, our average price is down to $1,003,000, which is down about 7.5% year over year. The silver lining here is that after a really bad August, we are up slightly, just up 2.5% from where our price was in August of 2024. I don’t think prices are on the rise, but we’re definitely not plummeting, which is good news. Something to note is that of the 57 units that sold this September, 37 of them were under a million dollars. This shows that our lower price points are still moving and that is what’s causing our average price to go down. Also, of the other 20 units sold, only four of them were over 1.5 million dollars, so there really weren’t a lot of big transactions last month, which is not surprising. 

Looking at what happened in Halton Hills this week, Georgetown had 10 sales which is good, but they also had 13 new listings, so again our new listings are outpacing our sales. Acton had six sales and four new listings so it was a good week there. Glen Williams had no sales and one new listing. Limehouse had no sales and no new listings. The rural market did have one sale but they also had three new listings. The saving grace this week is that we had some terminations that kept inventory from rising. So, nine properties came off of the market and didn’t re-list. Two properties re-listed at the same price. One home that had tried to do an offer night ended up re-listing higher, and 11 properties lowered their price. So, we are still seeing a ton of people decreasing their pricing and that is not a surprise. 

So, looking at active inventory, the good news is that we are actually DOWN this week to 230 active listings. It is sad that this is good news because it’s actually one of our highest numbers ever, but at least it’s not going up. Last week I really thought we may reach 250 soon. We need to see more properties exit the market in order to get the market moving again though. So, in Georgetown, we are down slightly from 138 to 135 active listings. In our price points, under $800,000 remained the same at 14, $800,000 to a million is down from 33 to 28, and we are starting to see sales pick up here. One to 1.5 million stayed the same at 60, which is insanely high for this price point. Finally, 1.5 million plus is up from 31 to 33, which is not good news. This pocket is already extremely slow, and this is just adding more competition that they don’t need. Looking at Acton, they are up from 27 to 28. Glen Williams is up from eight to nine. Limehouse remained the same at eight and the rural market is down slightly from 51 to 50, which is still very high. 

Overall, this week was somewhat status quo. Nothing dramatic happened in terms of inventory going up or down and I do think we are still a couple of months away from seeing a dramatic drop in our inventory. I also don’t think sales are going to dramatically increase and I think we’ll continue to see between 10 and 13 sales in Georgetown each week. Our outer markets should hopefully have between four and six sales per week as well. The one issue is that I think we are going to continue to see new listings hitting the market which won’t be helpful for sellers. We really need the November/December exodus when people finally give up and try again in the new year or in the spring. We really just need inventory to dramatically drop which I don’t think is going to happen until December. I’m hoping that listings will start to slow down in October but I’m not sure if that will happen with all of the homes currently marketed as coming soon. I am optimistic though that inventory levels will soften a bit by the end of the year, however I also think that our prices are going to go down a bit this month. 

So, those are my thoughts on this week and our September numbers! Have a great week.