Best day to buy a home: tomorrow
Toronto firm pinpoints Jan. 17 as cheapest
• A real estate company telling you now is the best time to buy a home — that’s a line people have heard before. But pinpointing it to a specific day, this Tuesday, now there’s a twist.
Toronto real estate firm TheRedPin maintains, based on six years of research, that Tuesday, Jan. 17 is the best day to buy a home in the Toronto area — an assertion that not everybody is ready to believe.
The company says January buyers will save on average about $60,000 based on the data it analyzed for more than 650,000 home sales. It also says prices will spike in February.
“Housing inventory is low right now so it will be interesting to see if this January is any different than the trends we’ve identified over the past seven years,” said Tarik Gidamy, co- founder and broker of record for TheRedPin.
The company looked at the yearly average for prices between 2010 and 2016 and found in January that fi gure was $ 498,925. By comparison, average prices jump to $ 533,379 in February during the same period. The strongest month of the year is May — the so- called spring market — when the average price soared to $568,255,
“The advantages of home buying in the dead of a Toronto winter are significant. Homes are cheaper than any other month of the year, properties are on the market for longer,” says the company in a release. It adds that means fewer bidding wars.
Count Toronto mortgage broker Vince Gaetano, a principal of monstermortgage. ca, as a doubter about the magic of January — his own experience tells him the post-Thanksgiving period is when the real deals happen.
“I’ve been doing this for 25 years and we just notice a high level of marital breakups,” said Gaetano, about the October holiday. He says that just adds supply into the marketplace and will lower prices.
“When you have a high number of marital breakups, between Thanksgiving and Christmas is where the opportunity to buy begins. When people want to move on, they are motivated to get a deal done and won’t haggle on price.”
This year might also be a little different, the broker says, because of new mortgage rules that tightened lender criteria in the marketplace. Among the key changes, which didn’t go into full effect until December because of grandfathered deals, is a government stipulation that consumers qualify for loans based on the posted rate which is now 4.64 per cent — a move increasing monthly mortgage payments and qualifying consumers for smaller loans.
“You can still get t he money but it is going to cost you more,” says Gaetano, noting non-traditional lenders have jumped into the market with higher rates.
SalGuatieri, senior economist with Bank of Montreal, said he hadn’t heard of the January phenomenon but wondered whether weather was scaring off more than a few buyers. “Some people may just have shopping fatigue after the holiday season,” he says, adding that the number of listings go way down in the winter.
With daytime temperatures expected to remain above freezing for the next two weeks, according to The Weather Network, the housing market may still have some tailwinds for the rest of this month in the Greater Toronto Area. The market doesn’t need much help in Canada’s largest city, having recorded an overall average increase in prices of 17.3 per cent in 2016, according to the Toronto Real Estate Board.
The economist cautions that January could face a cold front coming in from Ottawa in the form of tighter mortgage regulations from the federal government. “We believe the tougher rules will crimp demand in Toronto,” said Guatieri.
ADVANTAGES OF HOME BUYING IN THE DEAD OF A TORONTO WINTER ARE SIGNIFICANT.