Vancouver Real Estate Goes Full-Retard; Average Home Price Now $1.8 Million
Last week we identified a “bargain” in Canadian real estate.
As you might recall, the Canadian economy is in a bit of a tailspin, and that goes double for the country’s dying oil patch. Indeed, we’ve documented Alberta’s painful experience with slumping crude exhaustively, noting that the steep decline in oil prices has triggered job losses (which hit their highest level in 34 years in 2015), depression, suicides, soaring food bank usage, and a marked uptick in property crime.
Through it all, parts of the real estate market in Canada remain red hot. In stark contrast to the millions of square feet of office space sitting vacant in beleaguered Calgary, Toronto and Vancouver are on fire.
Housing sales in the Toronto area rose 8.2% last month from a year earlier. The average selling price: $631,092.
In Vancouver, the numbers are simply astonishing. Residential property sales in Greater Vancouver rose 31.7% in January. That’s 46% above the 10-year sales average for the first month of the year and the second highest January ever, the Greater Vancouver Real Estate Board notes. The benchmark price for a detached home in Vancouver: $1,293,700. The benchmark price for an apartment: $456,600.
But it gets still crazier. The “benchmark” price represents what the Real Estate Board says a “typical” home would go for on the market. If we simply take the arithmetic mean (i.e. the average), the numbers are even more astounding. As CTV news reports, the average selling price of detached homes was much higher last month – at an astronomical $1.82 million.
“Home buyer demand is at near record heights and home seller supply is as low as we’ve seen in many years,” REBGV President Darcy McLeod said.
So a seller’s market. Got it.
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