Archives:
December 2011 & 2010 Residential and Condo Sales
As December came to a steady close, we thought to share the residential and condo total sales in Edmonton and Area (St Albert, Sherwood Park, and Spruce Grove). These statistics will include the average sale price and the average days on market. We also find it important to compare each month to the same month of the year prior. We plan to share these statistics with you at the close of each month in 2012.
2009 Year in Review
If I was paid a dollar last year for every time I was asked, “So how’s the market?”.” I would’ve earned an extra $126,830 or so. Pretty decent, hey? For a recession, the market was amazing. “It’s on fire” was a phrase that I used, and I had the numbers to back it. To give you an idea, last year there were a total of 19,139 units sold. In 2006 there were 21,984 total sales. Not quite as many, but like I said, it’s not too bad for a recession. However, here’s the interesting part: 61% of the total sales (11,717) were under the $400,000 mark, which is what I call the money spot, and broken down into increments, the majority of those sales (3537) were in the range of $250,000-$300,000.
Single-family homes dominated the market last year in terms of the type of property sold, accounting for almost 75% of all sales, with condos accounting for 21% and duplex/rowhouses taking third place at 4%. There’s no question that there was an increase in price for single-family homes—not a boom, mind you, but it would be fair to say there was a 3% increase. Condos, on the other hand, remained fairly consistent throughout the year.
I would say inventory levels stayed more or less average, or maybe slightly above average given our population, throughout most of 2009. But towards the end, we started to see the inventory decline and a shortage of good properties is now quite evident. The situation was quite different in 2008: If you were trying to sell your home in the summer of ’08, you might have had to throw your car into the deal to provide enough incentive for a potential buyer to write you an offer. Not so in ’09. We saw a lot of properties getting multiple offers, many sellers receiving offers after the first day, and even some properties selling for more than they were actually worth.
Forecasts indicate that at least the majority of 2010 will follow the 2009 trends, and I would definitely say that the main contributing factor for all of the action in 2009, and for the expected activity in 2010, was and is interest rates!
So that’s our quick summary of 2009, but we’ll be updating this blog with everything and anything that the market does this year too, so keep in touch and stay tuned. And if any of you have specific questions about anything at all to do with real estate, we want you to ask!
Ray Elwenni.