Weekly Wrap Up...It's Not the Real Estate Numbers that were Last Week's Shocker!

Sudbury Real Estate Wrap Up: July 15th - 31st

Wow, another summer long weekend in the books! We know we're a bit behind...but better late than never! David Kurt is back on the mic to share last week's market wrap up! Surprisingly...it's NOT the real estate numbers that are this week's shocker but the Sudbury COVID numbers! The Sudbury numbers are spiking at an alarming rate, with 22 new cases in the last week and a half (and rumour that there is a bunch more being announced today); not so great for Sudbury. We’ve spent months trending in the right direction, and it's understandable that teenagers are going to get an itch for big outdoor social gatherings (the Sudbury rumour mill has that a Garson ‘bush’ party played a big role in some of the spread this week), but it shows how easy it is for our numbers to trend in the wrong direction. The spike in numbers led to a quick decision by Penny Sutcliffe to reverse the decision she made to relax visitor restrictions at the hospital, and there are threats of more shutdowns or restrictions in the near future.

Schools announced that kids will be going back in the fall (at least for primary students); grade 4+ kids will be wearing masks. High school kids will self-monitor and be on a hybrid schedule of online and in class. I think I heard an audible sigh of relief for all parents across the province yesterday when the announcement was made. As of today, you can even go catch a movie at Silver City if that's something you’ve missed (50 people max/theatre, maybe buy your ticket online to skip the line).

The increase in sales actually reverses the trend we saw for the last 3 weeks of decreasing sales. It's still a far cry from the 75 sales we saw the first week of July, but my prediction was that sales were going to continue to slow down, and that didn’t happen this week.

Although 64 new listings seem like a healthy amount this week (and a slight increase over last weeks numbers); it seems to show that there isn’t a week to week pattern with new listings, if we chart the numbers over the last 3 weeks we can see a trend towards increasing listings, but it is still a stat that's more unpredictable than I would have initially thought.

The market continues to feel like it has slowed a touch, although the numbers don’t back it up this week. I think the most interesting observation from this week came from a few of the listings that we had a buyer make an offer on a few weeks ago. I wrote about the frustration he was going through putting offers on a few different places just a few weeks ago. I actually had one of the agents reach out to me to see if we would still be interested in offering our last offer (we weren’t); and 2 of the other places we made offers on were recently reduced. This is showing that even in a hot market ultimately the buyer has to be willing to pay your price, especially on the step-up (higher priced) homes.

70% of the sales this week were under the 350k price point. It makes sense that we would see the majority of sales in lower-priced homes (average in Sudbury is just under 340k), but it does seem to skew towards more entry-level homes.

We have seen a push towards multi-family properties in the last few weeks; we are seeing in a few cases these properties going in bidding wars as well. It seemed like the prices in Sudbury (multi-family specifically) were getting so high on a per/unit basis that it seemed that that market had slowed. This seems to not be the case currently, especially around purpose-built rental buildings in good locations (not flour-mill/Donovan). I wonder if it is the increase in equity that people are seeing in their principal homes is funnelling an increase in this marketplace as well.

Hope everyone has an awesome week! Be on the lookout for this week's wrap up of the first week of August!