5 Bullet Friday...Shifting to a Buyer's Market?

Welcome back Sudbury! 👋

Here are my 5 takeaways this week:



📈The end of March was the last time we saw a week where sales out-paced listings. Since then, it has been more listings every week than sales, and that trend continued this week with 66 listings and 49 sales. With that difference, we jumped on total listings available to 325; this is officially the highest number of listings we have hit in the last 4 years since I've been tracking the weekly numbers. Even with the new high for listings, I don’t think we are done yet, as I think listings are going to continue to grow until the end of summer. Buckle up as we may be in for a bit of a bumpy market when it comes to supply vs demand.

🏡I’ve been saying for a while that we have shifted into a buyer's market, but no one has told the sellers, and most of the buyers aren’t aware either. With the shift in inventory, we see that we are headed to a market where the power has shifted to buyers, but still there are 10+ offers on homes and they are going for wild premiums. The conversation I am having with a lot of buyers right now is; don’t be afraid to pull the trigger on a place now, but do so on your terms at prices and conditions that make sense to you.

⬆️Listings continue to increase, and with fewer and fewer buyers, I can see a world where as new listings come to the market, we will see the motivated sellers who don’t find a buyer right away take steps to reduce below the competition to try motivate buyers to come look, which will lead to a slide in values. New listings that come out that are priced right, and match the buyers' search criteria will still continue to get scooped up quickly. But I see a marketplace going in two different directions. The value of good listings hitting the market will stay stable and likely even grow, whereas the homes that don’t match the criteria of buyers (location, size, quirks) will slide in value.

🔨The CMCH numbers on new builds in Sudbury continue to buck the trend that they are seeing in Southern Ontario when it comes to new construction. New sales through MLS for the first part of this year is 30 sales versus last year's 23; and even the CMCH numbers for new building permits are up in 2024 versus 2023 in Greater Sudbury. A lot of agents who represent new builders down south have said that they expect little to no new activity in the next two years. A lot of the builders have told their trades down south to pack it up as they don’t plan on stepping up the production for a few years, until rates come back down and buyers increase. This is a big shake up and one I expect to make its way up north eventually. I see the second half of this year being a lot slower for new sales than we saw in the first 6 months of the year.

📊I love tracking the mortgage rates. It's one of the first questions a lot of buyers have when they are searching, and wowa.ca is a great website that tracks 40+ lenders and publishes key rates every week. As of a few days ago, the top 3-year fixed numbers were 4.69 insured and 4.99 uninsured. The 5 year fixed rate was 4.39 insured (and 4.89 uninsured). The fact that people can go get a 5 year rate under 5% (this being some of the lowest rates in Canada) is a huge positive, but it's interesting to see that it's not a big enough attraction to motivate more buyers. It's not just rates; they have to be confident in their own financial balance sheet that will give them the boost to get out in the market and pull the trigger on a first home or a bigger home. As we see rates trend lower, we have to remember that this alone won’t make for a more healthy real estate marketplace; buyers have to be willing and able to buy still.  



That’s it for this week, let's connect next Friday for another Sudbury Market update!