Latest Videos
The information you requested is not available at this time, please check back again soon.
The Toronto Regional Real Estate Board says Greater Toronto home sales in April were down five per cent from last year, but new listings surged, which created more choice for buyers and kept prices stable.
Hong Kong stocks are on their longest winning streak since 2018, with a growing chorus of market watchers saying the worst of a years-long selloff is probably over.
Toronto’s traditional spring housing market kicked off in favor of buyers as prices fell and new listings rose from the same time last year.
Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani has sold a Mayfair mansion to another member of the nation’s ruling family, one of London’s most expensive home deals in the past year.
Greg Ward, the Macquarie Group Ltd. banker in charge of the firm’s drive to grab a bigger slice of Australia’s mortgage market, will earn more than the boss of the country’s biggest bank for home loans, as the far smaller rival chips away in the ultra-competitive industry.
May 16, 2018
, Bloomberg News
In the face of a correction in Toronto’s housing market, sellers aren’t panicking.
Even with transactions at their lowest level since the 2009 recession, sellers in Canada’s largest city have avoided listing their homes en masse in what could be a sign of confidence the market will come back. According to data released Tuesday by the Canadian Real Estate Association, new listings in Toronto fell 8.6 per cent in April from a month earlier and are down nearly 30 per cent from a year ago.
The drop has left the sales-to-listings ratio -- a key gauge of a real estate market’s health -- relatively stable in the face of a sharp drop in sales, which may explain why prices in Toronto continue to hold steady. Prices are up 3.1 per cent since the beginning of 2018, even as transactions plunged.
“The market is actually surprisingly relatively balanced,” said John Pasalis, president of Toronto-based brokerage firm Realosophy Realty Inc. “When you’re comparing yourself to a bubble, sales can fall 40 per cent and inventory can rise and your market is still balanced.”
It’s still been a rough year for Toronto’s realtors, after federal regulators tightened mortgage qualification rules on Jan. 1 to quell a surge in prices early last year. The market is also facing a new foreign buyers tax and other measures to curb demand.
Toronto’s real estate market is also coping with a bulk of unsold active listings, a legacy of last year’s surge in prices that prompted people rushed to sell their homes. The sales-to-new-listings ratio, while stabilized, is still at the lower end of the range over the past decade.
The ratio has averaged 0.46 over the last year, the lowest level since the recession and at the lower-end of what analysts typically consider a balanced market. But at least, it hasn’t been getting any worse.
Year to date, sales have fallen by a third compared to the start of 2017. New listings are down just 4.7 per cent over the same period.
“It may be that people are trying to time the bottom of the market,” said Rishi Sondhi, an economist with Toronto-Dominion Bank. “They’re holding out because they think the market is going to turn around.”
--With assistance from Natalie Wong
Related
