Northern BC home sales see 33% decline in the past year

Home sales across the BC Northern Real Estate Board have seen a steep drop over the past 12 months.

However, BC Real Estate Association Chief Economist, Brendon Ogmundson told Vista Radio the April numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt.

“357 unit sales were recorded across the BC Northern Real Estate Board – that is down 32.6% year-over-year but that is also down from the highest April on record as it’s kind of hard to take much meaning out of that. Overall, we are seeing that sales are trending back to historical average levels.”

He adds while there were just 1,243 active listings in the north during April, which represents a 23% decline from the same month last year, more stock is slowly coming on to the market.

Ogmundson stated the stock remains wafer-thin.

“It’s still really low. It’s one of those situations where it couldn’t have gotten much lower than it did towards the end of 2021. At just over 1,200 listings in the northern region, that is still really low and is down over 20% from a really low 2021.”

However, with the Bank of Canada raising its key interest rate twice in rather short order, Ogmunsdon believes better days are ahead when it comes to listings.

“I think there will be a couple of ways we see more inventory. One is just fewer sales, which means homes are going to be on the market longer and listings will accumulate that way. That is part of the normalization of the housing market. The other thing too is we will see a bump in new listings, as well as sellers, try to get ahead of those rate increases.”

In Northern BC, the average price for a home is $455,717 – a spike of 18% when compared to April of 2021.

Provincially, the cost is over twice as high at $1.065 million, up nearly 13% when it was just under 944-thousand during the same month last year.