Halton Hills Housing Update - Ep.247

Welcome to this week’s Halton Hills Housing update! Our numbers are still not great in terms of where we normally are and it’s not going in the direction we want to see this time of year. So, looking at what happened last week, Georgetown had seven sales which is not a very high number considering how many listings we have available. The more concerning number is the 13 new listings we had. In Acton this week, we had one sale and three new listings. Glen Williams had no sales and one new listing and the rural market had no sales and five new listings. So overall, we had 22 new listings and only eight sales. You can see how this is a problem. We really need to start seeing sales pickup. The new listing numbers really aren’t that crazy compared to last year, but our sales are very soft. This trend is definitely not favourable to sellers right now. We also had 10 properties that relisted at a lower price this week and eight that came completely off of the market. Without those eight our inventory would be up quite a bit this week. It’s good news that people are exiting because it’s really not a great time to be selling. There was also one listing that re-listed at the same price to freshen it up. So looking at these numbers, we can definitely see people adjusting their prices downward which makes sense given where our market is at. 

Looking at active inventory, all of Halton Hills is up from 175 to 184 listing this week. We are getting so close to the 200 mark again which felt so far away in January. If we have another week with a 10+ gap between listings and sales, we will really start to feel the pinch. I’m Georgetown this week, we are up from 99 to 104 listings. The main problem here is that I don’t think we’re going backwards anytime soon. Looking at our price points, under $800,000 is down slightly from 9 to 8 active listings. Eight hundred thousand to a million is up from 22 to 28 which is a bigger jump. The majority of these properties are town homes and they aren’t flying off the shelf like they normally do. One to 1.5 million is up slightly from 38 to 39 listings and 1.5 million plus is down slightly from 30 to 29 listings. A lot of these properties have been on the market for a very long time but there aren’t a lot of buyers transacting in this price point right now. During the first six weeks of the year we were seeing sales in the higher price points, more towards $1,250,000, but we just weren’t seeing the momentum there anymore. So, looking at our other markets, Acton is up slightly from 15 to 16 listings. This is still much lower than the 30+ we saw last year but it is increasing each week. Glen Williams is up from 8 to 9 active listings but a lot of it is over 1.5 million. The rural market is up to 55 listings which is the highest number we’ve ever seen. Nothing is moving there but that’s because of the prices. A lot of these homes are two to five million dollars and those buyers are just not active right now. 

We still have a lot of uncertainty in our market and in our economy but interest rates are at a good level. We should be seeing more buyer demand based on that alone but now with an election etc. I think people are just hesitant to make any big moves right now. It’s just not very busy. Open houses have traffic and people are booking showings but it doesn’t feel like that is really translating into sales right now. Georgetown hasn’t had double digit sales in a month now, so we are just in a quiet spot. 

Next week I will have March numbers and I think it’ll be a similar story to February with units sold down and possibly price too. This is just an uncharacteristic March. I’m hoping once everything is sorted out, buyer confidence will return and we’ll see things pick up. So, I’ll be back next week, have a great weekend!