THUNDER BAY — After a slump in house sales across Thunder Bay earlier this year due to COVID-19, the market has made a robust recovery.
The Thunder Bay Real Estate Board started seeing evidence of a rebound in June, when house sales spiked by 30 per cent from June 2019.
July sales rose by nearly nine percent from a year ago.
Although the market flattened in August, the improving trend has picked up again, and the president of the board expects it will last through the end of the year.
September was the second biggest month in sales volume this year, whereas it is normally only the fifth or sixth biggest.
"That's because of that pent-up demand. We got held back in March, April, May," Andrew Lawrence says.
September unit sales for single-famiily detached homes climbed about 20 per cent above the same month in 2019.
By contrast, in the first quarter of the year, unit sales fell by almost 10 per cent from a year earlier, and dropped even more – by 21 per cent – in the second quarter year-to-year.
In the quarter that just ended, sales shot up by nearly 12 per cent over the equivalent period last year.
Lawrence said "Are we balanced from last year yet? No. But by the end of the year I believe we will be equal to or above last year in unit sales. But it's all going to be from June to the end of the year."
He described the current local market as a seller's market, but said "it is not tilted as much to the seller as some think."
According to Lawrence, some sellers make the mistake of not listening to their listing agent on the issue of price.
"They want to put their houses dramaticaly above where they are because they're hearing all these reports from Toronto and Vancouver and they think it's like that across the board....but Toronto does not impact us."
Lawrence also discounts the role of low mortage rates, saying they "don't have as much of an impact as people think," other than how much they can afford to spend on a house.
He explained it doesn't necessarily influence whether an individual buys, but where that person can afford to buy.
Lawrence sees total unit sales as a more useful way to assess the state of the housing market than the average selling price, because the popularity of different price ranges can fluctuate so much over the course of a year.
As an example, the Thunder Bay Real Estate Board reports that the average selling price in the city went up by seven per cent last month from September 2019.
However, Lawrence said a key reason was that higher-priced homes (above $500,000) "just took off" in September in terms of buyer preferences.
One national real estate firm reports that semi-rural properties in the Thunder Bay area have experienced a surge in demand since the pandemic, with purchasers looking for more spacious homes and properties.
It says the luxury market also remains strong, with an increase in demand for properties and a subsequent increase in average home prices.
The median sale price for single detached homes in Thunder Bay was $265,000 last month, compared with $253,000 in August.
The Canadian Real Estate Association says that in August, single detached properties in the city spent a median of only 13.5 days on the market, down from 19 days in August 2019 and one of the shortest times on record.
A national survey conducted by Leger for Re/MAX found that Canadians are almost equally split in their confidence in the real estate market, with 39 per cent as confident as they were prior to the pandemic, and only 37 per cent slightly less confident.
Regarding the impact of a second wave of COVID-19, 56 per cent of participants told the pollling firm they are still likely to buy or sell.
