Weekly Wrap Up...Prices Remain Constant as Market Cools

It was a pretty active week for the Liberals. The previous Finance minister, Bill Morneau, quit or was told to quit all in the untangling of the ethical mess tied to the WE Charity. He forgot to pay back his travel tab of 50k, a small oversight for the finance minister, especially when his daughter is employed by the charity. In stepped a new Minister of Finance, Chrystia Freeland, and although having almost no financial experience or business background; she seems to have some lofty plans. Everything I read seems to hint that Trudeau is pointed to introduce some version of Universal Basic Income. If we think we are in debt as a country now, we may just be getting started.
In local news, kids will have a staggered start to school this fall. We have one new case of COVID (so far-so good Sudbury, good job keeping those numbers down), and we saw a display of the worst parent of the year encourage his daughter to beat up another kid. Wow, that was a busy week. On a real estate perspective, last week we hit what seemed to be a turning point shifting our market; we saw listings spike and sales slow to a crawl.

This week we saw the market go back to more sales and new listings, but not by much. Sales actually hit their highest number in the last 6-weeks!

Despite the large number of Sales; there is a great number of them that are under 300k showing that the entry-level price point is still very active. I’ve made this prediction in the past a few times but this price range will be the last range to slow down.

I was reviewing the conditional deals, and only a couple of them were listed in the last week. That is a huge shift we haven’t seen in the last few months. Typically, the new listings are the hot commodities and getting scooped up as soon as they hit the market. This is not the case this week.

As much as every listing agent wants to hold off offers; we’ve seen presumptive offers (or Bully Offers as I prefer to call them) test the sellers and other buyer agents. It happened to one of my teammates this week. He was presented with a Bully offer; his client had not signed a form (in the real estate biz we call it 'form 244') that stated they would refuse to look at any offer that came in before their offer date. He presented the offer and the clients loved it and it sold firm on the spot. The tough part is the backlash he’s getting from other agents saying it wasn’t fair that they weren’t notified about the bully offer. The biggest piece of advice here is as a buyer, if you see a listing with a future offer date and you're interested, book your showing asap; even if it's not for a few days. When we notify ‘anyone who has shown interest in the property’ about Bully Offers, we use the list of showing requests as those to notify. Any agents who hadn’t reached out yet were out of the loop.

A few deals this week, especially in higher price points went for a big chunk of $ under the listing price. This reinforces the point I’ve been making in the past few weeks that buyers in these price points are being super picky. They know what they want and they are in the driver's seat when they are shopping for it.

We saw 2 listings this week sell for 1M + and if you add in one that sold at 980K, that brings the total to 3 (almost) Million dollar listings this week. There are only 6 sales over a Mil in the last year! I think what’s happening here is that buyers are seeing benefits from the increase in their equity in the crazy market and aren’t afraid to jump up in price if they feel like the value is there.

As much as the market is cooling down, it's not crashing and prices are still remaining constant. There will be some tinkering with prices as we try to get a sense of what true values are when FOMO disappears from the marketplace, but all-in-all, I think we’ll continue to see steady growth in prices as we adjust to colder weather and turning the furnaces back on again. Hope you’re staying safe and enjoy the last few weeks of lake dips before the leaves start turning!


Til' Next Time!