Fewer home bids easing competition for some, but prices still high: brokers

TORONTO

Prospective buyers who have grown tired of going up against dozens of competitors to purchase a home are starting to get some relief from the frenzy seen over the past two years.

Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal brokers say plenty of properties are seeing fewer offers than just a couple of months ago when buyer anxiety was still driving frantic bidding wars, but that the slowing bids haven’t yet led to big price drops.

“With a lot of the smaller condos under 1000 square feet, or semi-detached properties up to $1.5 million or even just under $2 million, I’m finding for sure, there’s fewer people that are bidding compared to in February,” said Sara Rowshanbin, a broker with Chestnut Park Real Estate Limited in Toronto.

“So where I might have been bidding against 15 plus people, I now might be bidding against four or five people.”

The Toronto Regional Real Estate Board earlier this week reported the number of April sales in the market dropped by about 41 per cent from the same month last year and 27 per cent from March.

The average home price was more than $1.2 million, down from about $1.3 million the month before, but was still about 15 per cent higher than the year before, when the average price was more than $1 million.

Fuelling the drop in bids are prospective buyers that Rowshanbin has noticed feeling too nervous to wade into the market in case conditions quickly change, preferring instead to wait on the sidelines until they get a better sense of how much the market is really softening and how much rate changes will affect their buying power.

“They want to sort of reevaluate how they’re going to tackle this new market with the higher interest rates, but I don’t think they’re going to sit on the sidelines for too long,” she said.

Marc LeFrancois, a broker with Royal LePage Tendance in Montreal, has similar observations.

He’s recently seen homes sell after receiving a single offer or a few, rather than the 20 brokers were accustomed to dealing with months ago.

Last month, Montreal home sales dropped by 17 per cent from a year earlier, making it the least active

April the market has seen since 2017, the Quebec Professional Association of Real Estate Brokers said.

Despite the signs of a softening market, buyers didn’t get much of a break. Median prices for singlefamily homes rose 16 per cent to $580,000 in April 2021, up even from March 2020, when prices hit $566,000. The median price of a condo rose by 15 per cent year-over-year to reach $410,000.