Weekly Market Update, August 4/17

Thank you for the updates

Not really- they averaged $453 in June and $446 in July. You can't just cherry pick an outlier high point of the 4 week average in early July and compare it with a low in early August. The chart above suggests that historically there's lots of week to week volatility in price, which could be due to any number of things, especially product mix. Pick any year shown there and you can find a similar drop over a 4-6 week period. This one looks like it's due to higher end houses making up a larger than normal percentage of sales in June, leading to a bump that is now normalizing.

Gm, you can't compare the two points. There are always fewer buyers in early August so motivated sellers have fewer offers, resulting in lower prices on fewer sales. It'll come back heading into later August/early September as more buyers come back from vacations.

Home prices took a $20,000 hit in one month?

Just curious Mike what's your opinion regarding the impact the more increases in interest rate will have in the next few years.
I like you believe the economy is bouncing back up but so is the interest rate.
Do you think they will offset each other and the house price will remain flat in the coming years or one or the other will dominate and then the house price will either go up or down?

Interest rates won't go up unless the economy is chugging along nicely and inflation lifts. The worldwide problem at the moment is that economies are growing very slowly, inflation is lowish but the cheap money available has created high house prices and high share prices. Neither do much in the way of stimulating the economy.

Prices will come up and it is going to be record breaking winter and spring. Economy is bouncing back up...

Federal government, in their infinite wisdom, is making it almost impossible to get a mortgage now, in order to kill the housing markets in Vancouver and Toronto.
This will destroy the housing market all across Canada as an unintended consequence.

With all due respect, housing market is already destroyed in Canada. With average home prices 10-13x average income, it is already destroyed for young Canadians. Debt is rising to all time high.

Mike,

So the solution is to make it impossible for anyone to get a mortgage to bring prices down?

How many lives will be destroyed by this? People who have purchased homes already and will now be forced to give them back to the bank or claim bankruptcy? Socialism at its best.

GM,

My friend, don't call it socialism 'at its best'. It is not and if you disagree, you need to read some history what socialism can do at its best.

Young generation is under enormous debt because wages haven't caught up with housing, or housing haven't slowed down to wages - either way it(causing high debt) is a problem in Canadian society at the moment.

In you saying Federal govt is destroying the housing market - in fact federal government is rescuing people from taking on debt which their income cannot serve over the period of time.

Thank you for sharing this market information. Looking forward for more updates.