Home Sellers Current Situation Due to Cooling of Toronto’s Housing Market

hibusiness.ca
BY MARY EDEM
June 23, 2017

Most sellers in the Area of Greater Toronto have been affected by the housing-market slowdown as dollars weaken due to the value of houses they intend to sell. Some face the terrifying situation of handling two at $6,000 a month.

This decline prices and sales activity in Greater Toronto Areas seems like a temporary return to a better and even market, to many real-estate agents. This tricky situation has caused some sellers to have to reevaluate their housing plans while some are trying to avoid or cope with financial risks.

The general view of this among real-estate agents seems to be that the slowdown is temporary and everyone is hoping on Vancouver and anticipating what may happen next.

David Fleming of Bosley Real Estate and the Toronto Realty Blog says “In Vancouver, their [Home Price Index] benchmark dropped for three consecutive months and then went up for three consecutive months. No matter what stat you look at, prices have dropped but you’re only going to see five, six or seven months before it goes up.”

Not all neighborhoods In the Greater Toronto Area are affected equally by this.

Brendan Powell, a broker with Sage Real Estate’s BREL Team, supply in the core is still relatively small while the demand is high.

“In Vaughan, prices have dipped 10 per cent from the previous month while in Toronto proper it looked like prices went down 5 per cent,” stated David Ursino, a realtor with Royal LePage in Vaughan. “We’ve seen a drastic increase in listings. In the month of May we’ve seen 1,200 listings come out,” he added.

He believes that due to the large number of people reducing their prices and relisting their homes, some listings are being double-counted, thus there may not be as many homes as it seems. However, some houses are still moving; take for example, Barry Cappell listed his home of 39 years in Newmarket in early May. Another seller, Mr. Cappell took a risk and didn’t put his house on the market until he put in a final offer on a house in Bracebridge, Ont.

Mr. Cappell who clearly loves his new home said; “We were attempting to downsize but we really, really liked the house. It’s a bit bigger than the house we had but it’s okay, we can handle that, it means family can visit more often” as his daughter lives close by Huntsville.

He sold his Newmarket house in 11 days which is really slower than other homes in the area selling a few weeks before. But Mr. Cappell considers himself lucky by pointing out that if he had waited a little longer, things could have gone differently.

“Over the last two weeks, you see more and more houses going up with no activity,” Mr. Cappell said. “Not necessarily no open houses, but not a lot of people going in.”

As for some home owners, the temporary dip in the housing market is seen as an opportunity for them to upgrade like Krishnendu Chakraborty and his wife, Monika Nandy who bought a two-bedroom condo at Yonge and Finch in February, 2015. But this year, when they noticed that the price to similar units in their building were higher, they realized that their home had extremely increased in value. With the prices for detached houses declining, the elusive suburban home suddenly became a more affordable prospect.

Mr. Chakraborty, a 32-year-old lawyer at Rousseau Mazzuca LLP said, “We didn’t think we would be able to get one so soon. We see this market as an opportunity at the moment. I think people are still wanting to buy condos so the condo value is still there, even if it’s less than what it was in April. We want to use that money and get into the relatively cool housing market now that it has taken a bit of a dip.”