Weekly Wrap Up...New Listings Continue to be in the Gutter!

As the calendar turns over to the last month of 2020 and we wake up every morning to a new adventure of The Elf on a Shelf, I feel a sense of hope and optimism that we can see the end of this chaotic adventure of living in a global pandemic. It could be my eternal optimism or maybe the idea that I’m making my opinions from our bubble in Northern Ontario, but our cases have been consistently low; we are hovering between mostly a Green-light and maybe the odd Orange (or restrict)-light for the Public Health Sudbury and Districts. This second wave we are living in is a real threat, but for the time being our local businesses are able to operate (with safety measures), and as much as it's going to suck to have another family gathering over Zoom; the news that the virus is rolling out gives me hope that 2021 may bring back some normalcy. 

From a local perspective, it was a winning week for 2 nurses who hit the jackpot last week in HSN’s 50/50 draw. The draw hit the biggest prize yet of over $200k. These two young nurses bought a few tickets to celebrate a recent promotion. This should make for a Merry Christmas for their families for sure! On another note, the City is opening up public skating which I know me and my family are excited to get out for. As a COVID-twist, you have to book your session on the rink (which can be done at this link here). I’m excited to build an outdoor rink on the lake again this year for the kids but this should fill the gap until the ice is safe to get that started. 

From a real estate perspective, listings continued at extreme lows for the week, which is reasonable given Christmas is around the corner. While sales dropped from last week they still outpaced new listings by quite a bit.

My 5 takeaways this week are:

• New listings continue to be in the gutter this week; with one fewer listing than last week, we are officially at the lowest number since coming out of COVID. We are in the December market and I’ve specifically told more than one seller just this week not to list at this time and to wait until 2021. December 18th is the timeline in my mind that if you are on the market beyond that; you must be a ‘motivated seller’. We are approaching January 15th which statistically speaking is the cheapest day of the year to sell your home. It's the motivated sellers who dealt with showings and no offers all holiday season that come the new year are telling their agents they will deal with any offer. 
• The most surprising number I saw this week looking at the weekly stats is the number of conditional deals. As I’ve mentioned in the past, this is the snapshot in time about how active the market is at this given moment. Typically we see numbers in the mid-20s; we’ve seen up to the low 30’s and last weekend was the lowest points of 2020 at 19 conditional sales. Well, this week we dropped to 6… yea that’s right just 6!
• The second most surprising number is the number of sales; sure it's a drop off over last week's 43 but still pretty strong numbers at 35. I think we’ll see the drop off next week based on the few pending deals we are seeing at this moment in time, but for now, the numbers are staying relatively strong. The biggest fallout that comes from sales being what they are this week is the delta between the larger number of sales than new listings. This will continue to dry up the listings that buyers are picking from, making it feel more pressure on the buyers who are motivated to find something. 
• We had seen a few weeks in a row where the sales were barely fetching above the 4-500k range. This week we saw a return to some upper-end sale prices; we had 1/3rd of the deals this week over the 400k mark, and only 3 of those sales were in the Southend. The top sale of the week was a waterfront home in Azilda that topped out at almost 800k, still almost 40k below the asking price, but a house that was easy to fall in love with. There was quite a diverse representation of neighbourhoods on the upper end of the market this week: the Valley, Chelmsford, Azilda and New Sudbury just to name a few. I’ve been saying for a long time that buyers are willing to pay the premium prices if they fall in love with the home and that happened in a few cases this week. 
• The numbers should be dropping again in the next few weeks, but don’t take this as a sign that the bottom is falling out of the market. We always see a slow down over the holidays; and I fully expect this to be the same this year. The sales have actually been stronger than I expected but perhaps those are buyers who were frustrated with the chaos of the earlier bidding wars and put a hold on things until the market slowed down and are now taking advantage of the slowed pace of the market. Typically at this time of year, we see the vulture, buyers circling the prey waiting to pounce on desperate sellers. I don’t know if that’s going to be exactly the case this year, but it will be interesting to watch it unfold.

I know our family is excited this weekend to take our annual trip to Freskiw farms to pick out our tree. And with the Christmas lights up on the house and our Alexa streaming Christmas music constantly; it's impossible not to be in the Holiday spirit. The short-term forecast shows the cold weather isn’t going to be leaving any time soon, so as nice as it's been to not have to shovel snow yet; it looks like we are headed towards a white Christmas. 

Until next week, hope you are staying safe and we’ll chat next Friday!