January Home prices up…sales down…really?

January stats are in… According to a report in CBC News, the average price of a home sold in Canada on MLS was $328,537.   This is up by 19.6% from January 2009.  But sales seemed to taper off from December’s record high by declining 2.8%.    The supply of homes for sale is also down around 18% with 170,000 homes listed for sale on MLS.

It’s amazing how statistics can be tossed around and can be manipulated or misunderstood…  If you look deeper, you will see that 2009 started off very rough for house sales as the U.S. Mortgage crisis was just starting to take it’s effect… but then as we approached May and June, interest rates dropped and house sales started to increase….  A sort of pent-up demand was being fulfilled.

Watch for a traditional Spring market with good resale figures as buyers take action to benefit from record low interest rates and before the new HST comes in effect this summer.