Fewer home bids easing competition
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 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 1,000 square feet, or semidetached 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 re-evaluate 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 LeFrançois, a broker with Royal LePage Tendance in Montreal, has seen homes sell after receiving a single offer.
TRREB 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