It’s hard to believe how quickly this year has flown by, and with the end of this year comes a real estate market review!
My statistics below touch on Orillia, Severn, Oro-Medonte and Ramara and focus on single family detached homes to give you a sense of how the market behaved from Jan to the end of October. At the time of writing this, November statistics weren’t released yet and December has only just begun, so for now, we’ll only cover 10 out of 12 months.
It seems that compared to the last couple of years, the market has stabilized. We seem to be regulating more toward a balanced market and are seeing fewer instances of competing offers. Although, we are still seeing them – just not as often or as crazy compared to a couple years ago.
If you take a look at the graphs provided, you can see that the beginning of the year started out slowly as it typically does during those frosty winter months. Our usual Spring market kicked into gear by May with a peak in June before leveling off or declining for the remainder of the year. Our graph representing months of inventory initially seems to be doing the opposite of that when you look at it, but it does in fact align with the flow of the market over those 10 months.
Months of inventory helps us determine what type of market we are currently in or trending towards when we look at all of our data. The lower the number, the more quickly we will run out of inventory and the more the market is typically favouring Sellers. The higher the number means it would take longer to run out of housing inventory and usually favours buyers. So as you can tell from this graph, during our Spring market, there were only two to three months of inventory available signaling a busy market. By July, we had four months of inventory, with five months in August before leveling off at four months for September and October. Based on months of inventory we are leaning towards a more balanced market and I will be interested to see how the housing inventory progresses moving forward.
Pricing wise, our median sale price held steady throughout the year except for a peak in July of $837,500. I find that median sale prices give a bit more of an accurate picture compared to average sale prices. Medians remove any extremely low or extremely high points of data which could skew the results. In January, our median sale price was $740,000 and in October it settled around $660,500. With this graph you are able to see the steady increase until the summer and the slow decline as we approach the end of the year, aligning with the trends we can see in the other graphs.
I included a graph that highlights the median sales price over the last 10 years just because graphs are fun. I love looking at historical data and being able to recognize different points in history based on data trends.
The good news out of all of this is, there are some fantastic opportunities for buyers that we haven’t had in years. The ability to create well rounded offers to present to Sellers and the ability to negotiate again. That, to me, is what the real estate market should be. Not favouring one side or the other.
I am hopeful for 2024 and am looking forward to viewing market predictions in December and January. As I learn more information, you know I’ll share it here!
Data source: Barrie and District Association of Realtors.
