6 February 2018

“It was expected that real estate prices in certain market segments would go down in January from a year ago,” – noted Jason Mercer, TREB’s director of market analysis. The deal is that January 2017 reported an extremely low supply, pushing prices too high.

This lack of supply led to such a high level of prices growth that comparing the recent numbers to those ones makes the current situation look worse than it actually is.

However, it’s quite possible that market conditions will lead to positive price growth for many home types in the second half of this year, says Mercer.

In addition to it, home sales also fell down sharply.

Although January isn’t usually a very active month, the number of home sale across all types of housing went down by almost 20% from a year ago. But then again, January 2017 was very busy with 5,155 properties sold.

We’ve also seen two main rules changes last year affecting the market significantly.

“Later this year, we’ll see home sales growing, as the psychological effect from the Fair Housing Plan starts to weaken and homebuyers find the abilities to adapt to the new mortgage stress test,” – TREB president Tim Syrianos said.