GTA Home Sales Down 44% - but what does that really mean?

GTA Home Sales Down 44% – but what does that really mean? Keep reading to find out why headlines can often be misleading.

Before we get into the September Market Stats for Toronto and the GTA, a little recap on what certain metrics mean, specifically;

Sales
Price
New Listings

A lot of people tend to confuse the first two metrics, Sales and Price. And its not thier fault. Headlines have a way of capturing your attention because…they’re headlines!

Let’s take a look at this past months September data. SALES are down 44.1% since last September. If you read that quickly you might think that prices had dropped by that much. But when we talk about sales, we mean the NUMBER OF ACTUAL HOMES SOLD.

So, for example last month we sold just over 5000 homes sold. Compare that to last September when we sold over 9000. THAT’s where we get the 40% decline. The market is still adjusting to the higher borrowing costs, and people are going back to their mortgage brokers to reset and find out what they can now borrow, which is slowing the pace at which we sell homes.

Now, let’s look at our second metric of Price. The average home price this past month was still over $1mm at just over $1.08 million. And while this is the first month where we see prices have gone down YoY, it is just by 4%. But when we look at a month to month basis, from August to September, the average price is actually up by about $10,000.

Why might that be?

Well, that takes us to our next metric of NEW LISTINGS, i.e. the SUPPLY. And boy…are we ever low. This is the LOWEST AMOUNT OF NEW LISTINGS for September since way back in 2002. The amount of people that put their property up for sale this September vs last is down 16.7%. You heard me preaching all last year about our lack of supply…and now that supply is even lower, which helps explain why, against all the chatter out there about doom and gloom, prices, that is the amount you are going to pay for a house, are actually up month over month.

Of course this is all on a macro level. as always, please check out how YOUR micro market is performing, as real estate is all about location.