Hi, it's Cari Mai and this is your Vancouver real estate market update for May 2022.
Last month we saw sales volumes level off towards more typical levels for April! We're cooling down from the record breaking sales pace from last year in 2021. Sales volumes are currently just 1.5% above the 10 year April sales average. This cooling down will allow Buyers more time for due diligence like securing financing, and getting a home inspection! New listings to market have decreased 8.5% from last month in March 2022 and down 23% from last April. We're seeing the total number of homes listed for sale increase 15% compared with March 2022.
What I'm noticing is that homes are taking a little longer to sell these days and more Sellers are opting for a "first come, first served" approach in receiving offers! Homes that would get 8-10 offers three months ago would probably get around 3 offers now. Don't get me wrong, there's still a lot of activity happening at open houses and quite a bit of people expressing interest but when it comes to writing an offer, people are not so keen on competing anymore and are willing to wait and see what other people are doing. That said, Sellers - expect to be a bit more patient for the right offer to come along!
The MLS benchmark price is sitting at $1,374,500 - which is a 19% increase in price from April 2021 and a 1% increase from this March!
Compared with last April, the benchmark price for detached homes has increased 21%, for townhouses - an increase of 25%, and for condos - an increase of 16%. A note for Sellers: when pricing your home for sale in today's market, just completely ignore sold home prices from February 2022. Since then, interest rates have been slowly on the rise.
Here's some other news affecting our local real estate market.
The City of Vancouver is set to hike our Empty Homes Tax to 5% in 2023 from the current rate of 3%! For those who are unfamiliar, the Empty Homes Tax only applies to the City of Vancouver (for now), and was created to discourage residential property owners from leaving their homes vacant.
The City of Vancouver is now even proposing an Empty Stores Tax that's applied to commercial property owners for keeping their storefronts vacant. This one's ridiculous because local small businesses have been hit hard during the pandemic and as a result, commercial landlords are also feeling the crunch. It's not a landlord's first choice to just leave a retail storefront vacant for no reason... there's always a story behind it.
These taxes are more of a money grab from the City to help fund their initiatives for affordable housing and infrastructure because money has to come from somewhere, right?
There are also potential changes coming into effect in the near future on how offers on residential property will be orchestrated by deliberately delaying the offer presentation date and the cooling off period...which allows prospective home buyers enough time to do their due diligence.
Nobody knows exactly how this will work so we'll have to wait and see.
That's it for this month. Let me know if you have any questions feel free to DM me.
