The weather might be heating up, but housing prices have been cooling off year-over-year in Guelph.
The Canadian Real Estate Association said the average sale price of housing in the Guelph district dropped 16.3 per cent year-over-year to $910,257.
Tyson Hinschberger, the president of the Guelph and District Association of Realtors, believes it's a reflection of prices dropping more severely in the last year, and having recovered a bit.
Though in the short term, he pointed out home prices are up three per cent compared to January.
"We really hit the bottom around late December, as far as what we've seen in the last calendar year for the lowest prices," he said.
In December, he said the market was more balanced. But over the last few months, things have changed, and we're seeing more of a sellers market.
"That's largely due to a shrinking of supply, or a very tight supply of new listings," Hinschberger said. "Compared to a year ago, we're down about 33.5 per cent in terms of the number of new listings through the first four months of 2023."
Looking at April specifically, the number of new listings is down 43.3 per cent year-over-year.
He said a lot of the sales from the spring tend to close in the summer, and those are usually big family homes, so the sale price is often inflated in the spring and fall because that's when some of the bigger properties are changing hands.
There has been a lot of activity lately. Hinschberger said the number of transactions in April was up 11.8 per cent compared to March, and up 23.6 per cent from February.
He said it's a positive trend, and the numbers are demonstrating buyers and sellers are still willing to make transactions in this market.
But comparing April 2023 to April 2022, he said the number of transactions is down 10.6 per cent.
"Even though things are a little bit competitive out there for buyers, it's certainly not as it was a year ago this time," Hinschberger said.
As things move to the summer months, he said if we see a strong number of new listings, it could ease some of the recent price growth being seen, and normalize things a bit.
"But if that tight inventory persists, we can expect the prices to continue to grow and be stronger here over the summer as well," Hinschberger said.
