Early Spring Market - NOTL
February 13th 2018
I will start this post by saying, I would encourage as many comments as possible on this blog. I’d love to get into a few debates on some of the past and present subjects.
Early Spring Market.
Here are a few statistics which were supplied by The Niagara Association of Realtors – our local Real Estate board.
Sales in January 2017 – total 16. Average sale price $616,334.00 Sales in January 2018 – total 7. Average sale price $404,000.00
I don’t think that you can draw any conclusion as to where the average sale price is going to be at year end for twelve months from these stats. The sample size is simply too small. Seven sales is bordering on a historically low number in a month. What it does tell us is that there is not much product available in the township – the old town in particular. We haven’t had one of the larger properties sell in a while. Something in the 3-4 million range would certainly skew the average, especially with such low activity.
Personally, I have several people looking for old town properties, everyone in our office does. The demand is there. We need something to sell these Buyers. If you are thinking of selling a property, I couldn’t think of a better time. Where we probably won’t have seen dramatic increases, prices have likely held at a historically high level. When do you sell anything? High demand – with little or no competition for the product.
In order to back up my argument regarding prices holding, here are stats for St. Catharines and Fonthill.
St. Catharines
Sales January 2017 – total sales 148 Average sale price $315,669.00 Sales January 2018 – total sales 114 Average sale price $351,670.00
Fonthill
Sales January 2017 – total sales 16 Average sale price $477,851.00 Sales January 2018 – total sales 11 Average sale price $777,472.00
Though these markets are not same in that prices are more locally driven, especially St. Catharines. It does show that prices have held in traditionally less buoyant markets.
I think that when we see some more product on the market, the numbers in NOTL will fall in line. We tend to follow the GTA, which has been a bit sluggish.
That’s it for now. Let’s see how things look in a month or two.
Chris