April dollar sales are up again!  Don’t believe the media.  CBC News (amongst others) had the headline a few days ago “April's home sales down 41% from last year, 27% since March: Toronto realty board”.  What they failed to mention is that this is sales volume (ie number of homes sold) not dollar sales.  While volume sold is an interesting stat as it speaks to demand and when demand drops so should prices because the inventory will then go up.  Not in the case of Toronto Real Estate where the demand is so artificially high that the demand seems to need to drop more than 41% to see prices go down.  April 2022 vs April 2021 prices were UP 15%.  This is not as much as in previous months but still too high for a healthy “balanced” market (which I feel should see prices up around 6-10%).

The interesting trend is that we are historically in the middle of the Spring Market, the busiest time of the year both in volume and sales but this year we don’t feel it.  Yes the weather has not helped and there is a new COVID wave of infections but in April 2019 (pre-pandemic) there were 9,042 sales in TREB compared to April 2022 where there were only 8,008.  I don’t know if this is a trend that will continue with more of a flat line in sales volume as opposed to the historic spikes in both volume and prices in the Spring and Fall (to a lesser extent).  If it is, it will help with a more balanced real estate economy as sellers and their agents wont top load their listings for these periods thus we will have a more consistent sales cycle throughout the year.

The Spring Market used to go from Easter/March break (which was late this year) to May 24 long weekend.  Lately we saw it stretch to the end of June as Spring weather has seemed to start later and later.  The next few months will tell the tale if that is true for this year or not.