Real Estate

What's going on in this spring market of 2010? Since this is my intro blog I thought we would go back a little further than April and talk about what’s been happening since the world came to visit us a couple of months ago. You might be surprised to discover, like I was, that February was actually quite a busy month for us. Residential sales in Greater Vancouver for February 2010 totaled 2473, which is a 67.1% increase from the previous February and a 28% increase from January, with 110 of those homes being sold downtown. Quite surprising considering how challenging it was to get around and park downtown.

As expected for a normal spring market, March was a big month for listings with over 7 thousand new homes (attached, detached and apartments) being listed in the MLS system, bringing the March total to 13,538 homes for sale. Sales for March totaled 3,137 homes which is a 38.5% increase from March 09 and a 26.8% from the previous month. Which brings us to April, again another busy month with 3,512 sales, and 7,648 new listings, bringing the current total up to 15,901 homes for sale in the Greater Vancouver area.

What a month we had in November. Traditionally, November is when the market slows as we approach the holidays. While this month was no exception (we saw month to month declines in comparison to October) what was shocking was the explosion of activity in comparison to November 2008.

The average home in Greater Vancouver rose 12.4% over the past year.  In the City of Vancouver we blew this average out of the water. November 2009 saw detached homes up 24.61%, attached homes up 16.73% and apartments up 11.51% (all in comparison to the previous year).

These numbers mask, to some degree the fact that we saw (nearly) across the board DECLINES in prices month over month. Only detached homes on the Eastside (+0.82%) and apartments on the Westside (+0.51%) saw increases.

November 2009 was the third strongest (measured by the number of sales) on record. There were enormous increases year over year (+292.75%) in Sales. However, Listings rose only modestly (+23.79%) which saw the number of Active listings drop off (-45.43%).

Everyone in Vancouver is by now aware that the real estate market has bounced back. We can see it in the hard, cold numbers produced by the REBGV every month. Prices are up, sales are up and inventory is down. We can also see evidence of the rebound in the media. It's hard to find a newspaper article that is pessimistic about the future of Vancouver real estate these days. One more sign indicating that Vancouver real estate is once again hot is the return of the Vancouver condo development presale.

I was excited to learn that Google recently announced that they had refined their real estate search. Google has brought so many productive tools and incredible innovation to the internet. However, real estate has been one area that Google simply has not been able to get right.