Halton Hills Housing Update - Ep.246

Welcome to this week's Halton Hills housing update. I missed last week so we have a little bit of catching up to do. Overall, the trends are still continuing week to week. So, looking at sales, in Halton Hills last week we only had five sales which isn’t a huge surprise given that it was March break. The week prior to that we had 10 which is a more normal number. We also have quite a few homes in the sold conditional status but I’d say our sales are not as high as they would be in a typical March market. The bad news this week is that we had 17 new listings this week, which is a lot, especially for this time of year. Acton this week had one sale and four new listings. Glen Williams had no sales and one new listing. Finally, the rural market had one sale and three new listings. Before I deep dive into rural numbers I’m also going to mention that our system had a bunch of changes and they have changed the Halton Hills boundary lines. This impacts the number of listings we have in the rural market. I’ll elaborate on this in a little bit. So, the good news this week is that properties are starting to come off of the market. Again, this is not typical for March but it’s a weird time right now. Sellers are not getting the results they hoped for so they are starting to exit, which is surprising yet good. The main thing that kept inventory from skyrocketing this week was that eight properties terminated and didn’t reenter. This is a lot of terminations for March. We are used to seeing one or two, so eight is a lot! It’s showing us that sellers are not getting what they need so they’re not selling. We also had 10 properties re-list at a lower price this week, two relist at the same price and one raised their price after attempting an offer night. Typically in March we are seeing bidding wars and successful offer nights, but that’s just not the case right now. The other thing to note is that of the seven properties that sold last week, four of them were under a million dollars, so we are finally starting to see the shift where the majority of sales are under a million, which is the norm. 

So, looking at active inventory, all of Halton Hills is up from 162 two weeks ago to 175 listings this week. That is a lot. We are getting very close to the 200 mark, which we really don’t want to hit because the market really stalls when it gets that saturated. Georgetown is town to 99 active listings this week and the only thing keeping it under 100 are the properties that exited. Were also starting to see a shift of higher price point properties not selling as well as lower ones, and if that continues, we will fall right back into the trend we had last year. So, under $800,000 is down from 13 to nine active listings. This is where we’ve been seeing sales and it’s not super saturated right now. Eight hundred thousand to a million is up slightly from 21 to 22 active listings which is higher than we’d like to see. One to 1.5 million is up from 35 to 38 listings and 1.5 million plus is down from 31 to 30 active listings. 

In Acton this week we are up to 15 listings which is a total jump from where we were a month ago. It’s almost double now. The majority of properties are over $900,000 but they’re not moving as quickly. Glen Williams is up to eight active listings and the rural market has a big shift this week from 44 to 52 listings. A lot of these properties are very expensive, like two million plus, so it’s not surprising that inventory is sitting. 

Overall, we have seen properties terminating which helps keep inventory at bay but we are seeing way too many new listings for this time of year. We don’t have nearly enough sales to keep things balanced and I think we will continue to see this shift for the next few months. Inventory rates have gotten better but there are a lot of external factors and uneasiness that are causing buyer hesitation. Hopefully over the next few months those things can work themselves out and we can see some fuel in our market. So, we will continue to see what happens. We will definitely be down from last year in terms of March numbers but there are a lot of properties in the sold conditional status and we did have March break, so maybe it’s just a blip. I’ll be back on Tuesday, have a great week!