The following are the year end 2023 Grey Bruce residential real estate statistics for your review. The Bruce/Grey/Owen Sound area is used here because I feel it represents a reasonable sample size for trying to identify trends reasonably local.
There are two sections of charts.
One is overall raw residential stats from our Regional Association.
As marked on the attachment, some highlights are:
– According to this report year to year over all average sold prices are down 7.7%. This is the number the Owen Sound paper chose to report. I’d advise reading below for the HPI numbers as a counter-balance? As is often the case the media chose the most alarmist number without providing balance. They weren’t wrong … just conveniently incomplete.
– Supply in Dec was up 16% so there is support that Buyers are getting more strength
– The average length of time on the market to sell is still trending higher.
The other page is based on the MLS® Home Price Index (HPI). HPI tracks price trends more accurately than is possible using raw total measures. The HPI is based on the value home buyers assign to various housing attributes, which tend to evolve gradually over time. It therefore provides an “apples to apples” comparison of home prices across the entire country.
Monthly, it uses more than 15 years of data & sophisticated statistical models to define a “typical” home based on the features of homes that have been bought and sold.
A few curiosities appear on this one. For example:
– While the raw data shows a -7.7%-ish decrease in home prices over the year, the HPI reports a much more modest -0.5% decrease.
– Q4 seems to have been a semi strong trend to higher prices. Will that continue?
– One story homes (i.e bungalows) surprisingly decreased the most at -3%
– Townhouses actually fought the trend and increased +12% year over year.
– The Sales to List Price Ratio at 96.6% is the lowest it has been since 2016
What does it all mean? Arguments are being made in every direction these days.
I am just hopeful that it means we are having a similar soft landing that the overall economy seems to be experiencing. Who would have thought we would go this long without a housing crash or recession particularly after the wild days of the pandemic. I, for one, am thankful.
