October 2010 Real Estate Stats are in

The Victoria Real Estate Board released the numbers for October 2010.  

My house last night, not for sale

Clearly October was better than than September and August, but that said October was still not a good month.   October 2010 was better than October 2008 which was the worst October in many, many years. It is not the norm to see October having more sales than September.

The average price of a single family home is up but this is once again strongly influenced by a number of expensive sales.  If we look at the median price we see very little movement in October from August and September and in fact is broadly comparable to the prices in 2009 and only about 4% up on prices from three years ago, significantly below the rate of inflation.

Much the same pattern seems to have happened with condos, the average price was up but the median price was down.    That speaks to a fall in the lower end of the market.  Effectively there has been no increase in value of condos in the last three years making all the units purchased for investment purposes were bad decisions.

Supply is still outstripping demand.  The number of units coming onto the market in October was more than twice the number sold.   The total inventory is down as listings have expired, but we are still at over 4000 units for sale in October, the 13th highest inventory out of the last 100 months.

What do the trends look like?   We have some significant similarity to the winter of 2008/09 which was a very bad one for sales, the big difference is that the last three months have seen average prices heavily influenced by the sales of some expensive properties.  It seems that the bottom end of the market is either falling in price or is not selling.  

The rise in sales from September to October does seem to indicate the market is not in as much trouble as it could be.