Expert advice, market reports, and tips from the Niagara Region real estate professionals.
Who would have ever forecast back in March that this COVID-19 virus would have been lingering on throughout the spring and summer months and right on into the fall. But that is certainly what has happened. And while the economy is struggling to its feet, a lot of sections of the economy have yet to rebound, and some never will.
As of this writing the actual sales figures are not in from the Niagara Association of Realtors. The sense however from being immersed in the market is that August continues strong both in number of sales and in average residential sale price. Normally the market tends to moderate slightly as summer comes to an end, and that may be the case again, but if so, the numbers I suspect will not show much of a slowdown from July and will certainly be up from August 2019.
While COVID-19 has had a profound impact on every aspect of the Canadian economy, it has not affected all industries in the same way or to the same degree. We have seen the retail section, especially malls totally shut down as we on a National scale, a Provincial scale and at a municipal level seek to contain the transmission of the disease. Restaurants, hair salons, all were temporarily mandated to close. And while other industries such as travel may have been allowed to continue, wary travellers and geographic barriers ground them almost to a halt.
The sales data is in for the month of May and it is really quite encouraging. Across the 10 regions we track monthly in Niagara there were 499 sales registered last month. And there are two ways of looking at it. It was down considerably from the 778 sales registered in May of 2019. That’s a drop of 35.9%. But at the same time that 499 figure is significantly higher than the 280 registered in April. Up 78.2%
After years of relatively flat performance across Niagara, we began to see the market pace quicken in 2015 – 2016. While 2014 recorded 6,703 total residential sales throughout the Region as reported through the MLS, by 2015 that number had risen to 7,736, an increase of 15.41%. Then in 2016 the total residential sales had grown to 8,912, a further increase of 15.20%.
