Halifax Real Estate Market Update – March 2023 📈
Halifax Real Estate Market Report: Average Home Price in March Reaches $579,000.
Hey everyone, it’s that time again. March has finished, so we want to check out the stats. It’s an interesting one, like we did a little bit more deep dive this time, so let’s see what it’s looking like. Hey everyone, Richard Payne here from Halifax Homes on Lifestyles at exp Realty here in Halifax, Nova Scotia. We’re looking back at the month of March because it’s been a little bit odd. You’ll find out why when we go into a bit more detail, but it’s a little bit strange. So, let’s get straight into the biggest number that everybody wants to know about, which of course is what is the average price of houses here in Halifax Regional Municipality for the month of March. Well, it’s $579,000 and a little bit. Yeah, $579,539 is what it was last month or $538,000.
Halifax Real Estate Market Sees 8% Increase in March Due to Spring Market
When you look at that number, $579,000 thousand dollars on average for all of the houses that are sold in HRM in March, now when we go back like seven months because roughly for the last seven months, we’ve been kind of hovering around that $535,000 number, and it’s kind of just been going like this. It’s been pretty steady, then all of a sudden, we jump up eight percent in this month. Now let’s go back and look at last year. Last year was $639,500 thousand dollars, so we are down 90,400 in March of last year, but we also know that March, April, and May were kind of the peak of everything we ever did. So, it’s really interesting to say, well, we’re only like 10 off that number, and we’ve been bouncing around the 530 thousand-something number for seven months now. The big thing is why did we get such a good jump in the month of March? Well, it’s the spring market.
Top-Selling Markets Drive Price Increase in Spring Real Estate Market
We know that. However, the spring market didn’t actually show itself in the number of sales, so we’ll come to that shortly, but let’s stick with this thing because when we look at Timberly, Prospect, St. Margaret’s Bay and Glen Haven areas and then look at Sackville and we look at Eastern Colchester, West Hants which is Enfield Elmsdale and Lantz Area, those are our top three markets this month. So, spoiler surprise, but we’ll do those in more detail. But when you look at all three of those, they were the top-selling markets, but they also had big increases in average price from last month. So, if those are the markets that are driving the majority of the sales, like the majority, I’d say like 30 something like that were in those three markets, maybe 40, then you can see that those averages are up.
Multiple Areas in Nova Scotia Experience Significant Increase in Real Estate Prices
Now let’s throw in Bedford, which had a fairly large jump from last month to this month’s new sales, and let’s also have a look at a couple of the areas in Dartmouth, Colby and Dartmouth Montebello Keystone. They all went up fairly significantly in average price. So, when you start looking at some of those, and then you throw all of those into the mix, it’s not that difficult to see that the average price went up. You know, you look at Southend Halifax’s average price there of $1,150,000. Well, it was the same last month, so the average for South End Halifax didn’t really affect the prices. Fall River, another high-priced market area, didn’t really change from last month this month, so that can’t be in effect. So really, it’s been Sackville, Timberly, Prospect, St. Margaret’s Bay and Glen Haven, in there as well, and then Enfield, Elmsdale and Lantz top the markets and all had a good increase in price from last month. So, that’s what’s driving everything up.
Factors Driving Up Real Estate Prices and Multiple Offers in February
Now, there were some pretty good new builds that were sold as well, and that always drags that price up as well. So, throw those into the mix.I think that’s what’s been going on. Also, let’s throw into the mix why not? We’ve got a big third part here. We’re chucking stuff in. Well, let’s go into multiple offers again. They were driving over the asking price for sure, and we were part of four multiple offers, of which three we didn’t get, one we did. So, when you kind of look at that, I think buyers are definitely using their rate holds. We had the month of February when there was no base lending increase in the mortgage rate, so a lot of buyers said, “Well, fine. If there hasn’t been a base rate increase, we need to get into our 90-day rate hold, and we need to get something under agreement because the next one could be another increase in price for the base rate. So, like I say, when we look at the average sale price, we are plus eight percent on last month. We are down 9 percent.
Real Estate Market Holds Steady with Consistent Sale-to-List Price Ratio and Modest Increase in Home Sales
Four percent this time last year. Let’s look at the average sale-to-list price. We’re at like 99.9, so $579,000 was the average sell price as $580,000 was the list price, so we’re more or less there or thereabouts. Now, yes, some markets are up, some markets down, but on average, we’re good, and we’re holding at basically list price to sale price being the same. Last month was kind of the same, 99.4 percent which is not that much of a difference. Last year, well, that was 120% sale to list price. The sale price there was $639,000 thousand, so take basically 20 points off that more or less, and that’s what we were listing for. So, you can see that we are down 20 points really on what happened last year in terms of price. So, let’s have a look at the number of houses sold. There were 272 houses sold in March this year, and last month 233 houses sold. So, like up 17%, but you know, nothing huge to write home about.
March 2021 sees a 39% decrease in home sales compared to last year.
However, last year, 446 homes sold in March, so we’re down number of houses sold 39 percent. So, I went digging because I like to do this every now and again, and I was like, “Well, let’s go back to last year, 2022, 2021, a little bit of 2020 were all COVID years, and we’re fairly big selling months.” So, I’m like, “Okay, then let’s throw in 2019 and 2018.”And it seems that on average, for most of those years, we sell roughly 400 houses a month in March because it’s the spring market. People are starting to see the snow disappear and they’re starting to think about summer. They’re starting to think, ‘Well, if we want to move and be in a new house for summer, we kind of need to get it done in March.’ So, roughly 400 homes sell in March because that’s our spring. However, this time we only sold 272, which is much lower than we would normally sell in March.
Real Estate Market Shows Increase in Inventory and Days on Market
When you look at the number of active homes, there were 559 homes last month, and now there are 485. So we’re up 15 from last year, which was 248, so we’re up 125 from that. That clearly equates to the amount of inflation because if we have more houses active for sale this time compared to last year, and we’ve sold less this year compared to last year, guess what’s going to happen? Well, inventory has gone up. So we’re at 21 months last month, which is not a big change from last year when we were at 0.6, so up 250 from this time last year for the number of months of inventory that are actually for sale. Those are some of the key stats. Nowadays, Days on market is 28 days, and DOM for last month was 31, so down a little bit better than last month, but of course, going back to March last year, it was 11 days on market. So, up 17 days from last year. We’ve had more inventory for sale, we’ve actually been selling less, and those that are selling are actually staying on the market longer.
Current Real Estate Market: Average Days on Market for Homes Increases to 75 Days
Here’s the other little thing we want to look at; when we look at the number of houses that are actually for sale right now, the 559 homes, if we take an average of everything that’s for sale, the days on Market is now 75 days on Market.
Analysis of Real Estate Market Shows Builders Skew Numbers, Sellers Should Act Quickly.
So then you want to say, ‘Okay, but let’s strip out all the brand new construction, all the builders, let’s strip all of those guys out because we know that they can put something on the market 200 days ago because it’s going to take them roughly that long, maybe even longer, 250 days to actually construct the house for sale to move-in ready.’ So let’s strip out all the builders because they can definitely skew the numbers, and we’re going out to 62 days on Market, which is more or less double the average of those that did sell. So we go back to sellers, this is what it means for you: if your house has been on the market for longer than 14 days, two weeks, we know that you will get roughly the most viewings, the potential for the most amount of offers, and therefore hopefully an accepted offer in the first two weeks of you being for sale.
Maximizing Opportunities for Sellers: Why Allowing Ample Viewing Time Leads to Better Offers
A lot of those houses have been probably conditional pretty much quicker than that because we’re still playing that little bit of a let’s leave it open for all of us to be in by Sunday or four or five days later, or we want 24-48 hours, something like that, to make sure that everybody gets through, gets the maximum amount of opportunity to look at the property and write an offer, rather than the house comes up for sale today, the first person walks in the door, says, ‘I’ll give you asking price,’ done, finished. So when you look at that strategy, that means for sellers, if you haven’t had plenty of viewings, three things will happen, you’re either going to get no viewings, which means no offers, you’re either going to get viewings or no offers, and guess what that means? Or you get viewings and offers. Only number three is the one that you want. You want viewings, and you want an offer.
Reassessing Price and Condition: A Key Strategy for Selling Your Property
So if that doesn’t happen in the first 14 days, you need to reassess one of the three things: price, condition, and location.I’ve said this before, but you can’t change the location, so guess what? You’re going to have to change the price or condition. Your choice. But if you’re looking to get your property sold, and it’s not happening in the first 14 days, I would highly and strongly suggest that you need to look at the price versus the condition, look at all the competition, look at everybody that’s sold around you, look at the new ones that are coming up for sale, and if they’ve gone conditional, well, that means that they had the viewings on, they had offers. So from a selling point of view, you need a strategy and ensure you’re working that strategy, gotta make sure it’s going to work for you, and if you need any questions or any advice on that, consult your realtor. Buyers, what does it mean for you?
Advice for Buyers: Lower Your Expectations to Avoid Multiple Offers
Given that it’s like getting into that multiple offer situation, it basically means we’re not looking for a seven or an eight out of ten houses anymore. We’re kind of going down to a six, maybe a six and a half, possibly even a seven out of ten. Just understand that all the other buyers that are out there are also looking for six to seven out of ten houses as well. Yes, there are some eight, nine, and tens. Eight, nine, and tens are probably going to result in competing in multiple offers. So if you don’t want to be doing the multiple offers, I would strongly suggest you start changing the expectation of the properties that you’re going to be looking for. Maybe it’s time to find something that you can fix up and do some renovations, put some sweat equity in, and think about purchase plus improvement mortgages and do what you can that way. That’s the advice for buyers.
Real Estate Market Analysis: Sales to New Listing Ratio Indicates Inventory Levels May Increase.
Now let’s have a quick look at the sales to new listing ratio because that’s always a really good indicator of exactly what’s going on in the market as well. So sale to new listing ratio this month was 63%. That means we put a lot more listings on than we had sales in the month. Flip that to last month, that was 91%. So we were a lot closer with the number of sales to the new listings that we put on. Flip that to last year, and we were at 124%, which means we sold a lot more than we actually put up for sale. So we only put 433 houses on the market in the month of March, but we sold 272 of them. That’s what gives us our 63 percent. So if it’s lower than 100%, we are putting more houses on the market than we’re selling. If it’s more than 100%, we’re selling more houses than we’re putting on the market for sale in terms of new listings. So once it’s less than 100%, you can pretty much see inventory going up. If it’s over 100%, inventory levels are going to come down.
Low March Sales Volume and Increased Inventory Raise Questions for Home Buyers and Sellers
Simple math. One thing I really think is important to look at is the low volume of sales that took place in March compared to going all the way back to 2018. So we’re going back basically five years, and that’s an interesting one that tells you definitely that from a buying point of view, there’s not a lot of homes that are actually being bought because we’re increasing inventory. So is it a factor of that the buyers just can’t find what they want? Is it a factor that the people who are selling and their expectations are a bit too high, maybe on the selling price?
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