Halton Hills Housing Update - Ep.232

Welcome to this week's Halton Hills housing update! I have unofficial October numbers for you today as well as what happened in our market last week. So, looking at October, in 2023 our average price was $1,146,000. In October 2024, our average price is down about 11% to $1,018,000. Prices have softened since last year which isn’t a huge surprise, but the good news is that we are up from September’s $981,000 average price. We also had a really strong month in terms of units sold, so in October of 2023, we had 42 units sell, and this October we had 70, which is an increase of about 67%. This just shows that buyer activity is happening and I think that once our inventory softens, we will start to see prices coming back up. Both August and September had average prices under a million dollars, so this is definitely a good monthly update.

Looking at what happened last week, Georgetown had 11 sales and 14 new listings, which isn’t great news. We are still seeing a lot of new listings. Acton had six sales and one new listing which is a strong week for Acton. There were no sales and one new listing in Glen Williams. Limehouse had no sales and no new listings and the rural market had two sales and one new listing. It’s nice to see some sales in the rural market and not a ton of new listings since the rural market has been sitting really high with inventory. Looking at the properties that terminated and made adjustments, we had 12 properties exit the market which is great news. We want to continue to see double digit exits because it helps bring down inventory. There were also only three properties that reduced their price last week, which is lower than we’ve been seeing. We would definitely rather see terminations as opposed to price reductions. We also had three people re-list at the same price to freshen it up. I think we’re starting to head in the right direction with our terminations and if we continue to see strong sales weeks and double digit terminations, our market will be in a much better position come 2025. 

So, looking at active inventory this week, all of Halton Hills is down significantly to 203 active listings. We are so close to 200 I can taste it! We want to be a lot lower than 200 but getting back under that is a good milestone for us. In Georgetown this week, we are down from 116 to 114 active listings. We realistically want to see this in the 60s to 70s but we are heading in the right direction. Looking at our price points, under $800,000 is down from 17 to 14 active listings. Eight hundred thousand to a million is down from 20 to 19. These two price points are really going to start to fuel the market, especially with the interest rate reduction. Showings are picking up, sales are picking up in our lower price points, and that should fuel our market. One to 1.5 million is up from 55 to 57, which is not ideal but if the lower price points start to pick up, this pocket will too. We just need overall inventory to reduce. Finally, 1.5 million plus is up from 28 to 31 active listings and this price point is just not moving. There aren’t a lot of buyers who are looking in this price point but once we start to see more sales in the one to 1.5 pocket, I’m confident we will have more here too. People selling their home in the one to 1.5 pocket will be upgrading to a home over 1.5 million and that is how we will start to see sales again. This is what happened in 2022, and hopefully it’s what will happen again.

Acton this week is down from 26 to 21 active listings. Again, lots of movement happening there. Glen Williams is up from 10 to 11. Limehouse remained the same at 5 and the rural market is down slightly from 53 to 52.

Overall, I think this week's update is a positive one. We saw units sold take a huge jump year over year which shows that buyer confidence is coming back. Prices are up since August and September and our overall inventory levels are coming down. If these trends continue over the next eight weeks like they typically do, we are going to go into 2025 really strong. We could use another interest rate drop in December. Even though we were down year over year for pricing in October, I think we had a lot of positive things happen for our overall market. So, I’ll be back next Tuesday, have a great week.