Calgary’s residential real estate has gone from an oil-price-related slump to a noticeable recovery, according to the most recent Calgary Real Estate Board stats.
Home sales were up 6.21 per cent year over year in July, and are looking on track to be similarly up this August. Prices are still lagging somewhat, but the real story is in the sales-to-new-listings ratio, according to real estate website Zoocasa.
In an infographic blog post, Zoocasa calculated that the increase sales, combined with a dip in new listings, have nudged the city’s overall housing sector into seller’s market territory.
The report authors wrote, “The City of Calgary could be classified as a sellers’ market in July, along with half of the nearby municipalities within the Calgary region. That means competition is starting to heat up among buyers as the gap between supply and demand widens.”
Zoocasa used sales-to-new-listings ratios (SNLR) for their calculations, as opposed to the sales-to-active-listings ratios used by some other boards. With the SNLR measure, below 40 per cent is a buyer’s market, 40-59 per cent is balanced, and 60 per cent or more is a seller’s market.
When broken out by the city’s eight areas, and by detached houses versus condos, the study authors found that four of the areas were detached-home seller’s markets, and four were balance for detached homes. Six out of eight have a higher SNLR than this time last year.
In the condo sector, five areas were seller’s markets, two were balanced and one was still seeing buyer’s market conditions. Again, only two out of eight have a lower SNLR than this time last year, although not the same two areas as with detached homes.
However, the website noted that for some of these seller’s markets, the higher SNLR was created more by a significant drop in new listings than a jump in home sales — particularly in the South-East and North-West areas.
Check out Zoocasa’s breakdown of the city’s individual markets, below.
