Canada’s housing market continued its slowdown last month, with the volume of home sales down by more than a third compared to the boom times of last year — and prices down by almost 10 per cent since then, too.
The Canadian Real Estate Association, which represents Realtors, said in a release Tuesday that the national average selling price of a home that sold in October went for $644,643. That’s down by 9.9 per cent compared to the same month a year earlier, and down by even more from the peak of $816,720 in February 2022.
That was before the Bank of Canada began its aggressive campaign of hiking interest rates to rein in inflation. The central bank has raised its benchmark rate a half dozen times since then, and the impact on the housing market has been dramatic.
Average selling prices are down by more than 20 per cent since February, with declines seen in just about every market across the country.
CREA says the average selling price can be misleading, however, since it is easily skewed by sales in big expensive markets like Toronto and Vancouver, so it trumpets a different figure, known as the House Price Index, as being a better gauge of the overall market.
The HPI came in at $756,200 in October. That’s a decline of 1.2 per cent during the month, which CREA says is the smallest decline since June. But its also down by 8.2 per cent compared to what it was six months ago.
Any way you slice the numbers, the data on Canada’s housing market shows one that is much cooler than it was previously, but CREA noted that it’s not hard to see evidence that things are changing directions again, too.
“October provided another month’s worth of data suggesting the slowdown in Canadian housing markets is winding up,” CREA’s economist Shaun Cathcart said. “Sales actually popped up from September to October, and the decline in prices on a month-to-month basis got smaller for the fourth month in a row.”
More to come.