The national resale housing market sales activity has remained above from a year ago levels in August 2009, making it the third consecutive month. This is the largest year-over-year gain in more than two years.
The Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) releases statistics showing that a total of 42,483 homes traded hands through the Multiple Listings Service (MLS) Systems of Canadian real estate Boards in August 2009.
This is an increase of 18.5% from the August 2008, making it third consecutive month we see year-over-year gains of more than 15%.
Sales were 6.6% below the record for August 2007.
On a seasonally adjusted basis, the national MLS home sales held at 42,426 units. Seasonally adjusted activity in both Alberta and Quebec declined, thus offsetting activity gains in British Columbia.
Seasonally adjusted activity still remains at 60.8% above the decade low we saw in January.
Resale activity in August 2009 is up from what we saw a year ago, in about three quarters of all local markets.
Year-over-year gains in Vancouver was 117%; in Toronto we saw a 27% gain; Calgary was 17% and Montreal was 9%. These cities contributed the most to the national increase in activity.
Home sales activity for 25 major markets across Canada posted the third consecutive increase of more than 20% compared to levels seen a year ago.
The demand continues to improve in Canada’s more expensive housing market, pushing the national average price higher. The national MLS residential average price rose 11.3% to $324,779.
This is the highest national average price seen in the month of August.
New residential listings were down 8.9%, to 64,167 units, making it the lowest level for the month of August in the past 5 years. This is the eighth consecutive decline seen for the number of new listings coming onto the MLS.
There were 212,227 homes listed for sale on the MLS Systems of real estate Boards in Canada at the end of August 2009, which is down 13.3% from a year earlier. This makes it the fourth consecutive year-over-year decline seen in active listings.
On a national level, the number of months of inventory was up slightly to five months in August from 4.4 months in July; however this is still below the recessionary peak of 12.8 months in January 2009.
The seasonally adjusted dollar volume of all residential MLS sales has set a new record in August 2009. It has risen 1.5% from the previous month to $14 billion. British Columbia contributed the most to the increase having posted the highest seasonally adjusted dollar volume on record for the province.
The housing market is continuing to push forward; we might be able to see this trend continue in September. If this does happen, we can expect the number to only grow more positively.
Heleen Jacobsen
Broker of Record with InfoMarket Group GMAC Real Estate
www.infomarketgroup.com
