House prices continue year-over-year ascent

The limited number of houses on the market in Montreal is pushing prices up, said Georges Gaucher, the general manager of Royal LePage Village in Notre-Dame-de- Grâce.

“Inventories of two-storey houses and bungalows are low and when you have that phenomenon, what happens is people start bidding for houses,” he said.

The median price of a twostorey house sold in the Montreal area during the first three months of 2018 by Royal LePage was $492,751, the real estate firm said on Friday. That’s an increase of 8.3 per cent from the equivalent period the year before.

The biggest gain was in the western part of Montreal Island, where the median price rose 14.4 per cent year-over-year to $549,226, an increase of 7.2 per cent from the previous quarter.

In central Montreal, prices were up 13.9 per cent, year-over-year, to $686,253, though that was only a slight increase from the last three months of 2017.

The median condo price in the region rose to $314,554, a 3.5 per cent year-over-year increase, according to the real estate firm.

The biggest increase was in central Montreal, where condo prices rose 5.4 per cent year over year to $382,902.

Royal LePage credited that growth to the shortage of singlefamily homes on the market pushing people to buy condos and the absorption of the supply of condos on the market.

Another measure of house prices, released on Thursday, shows less growth. The Teranet–National Bank House Price Index was up 4.27 per cent for the Montreal region in March, when compared to March 2017.

However the index, which compares the resale value of houses that have sold more than twice, was down 0.17 per cent when compared to February.

The Greater Montreal Real Estate Board, which released a report last week, put the price of a single family home in the Montreal region at $314,900, an increase of five per cent from March 2017.

On Montreal Island, according to the GMREB, the median price of a single family home in March was $463,000, up four per cent from the equivalent period the year before. It said the median price of a condo sold on the island in March was $290,000, up less than one per cent from $289,500 in March 2017 and down three per cent from $300,000 in February.

The number of sales was up six per cent from 2017 in March, while the number of listings on the market was down 16 per cent, according to the GMREB.