I don’t know if anyone had a chance to see my vlog, I did on the market outlook and how the experts are expecting COVID 19 to affect the real estate market.
Summary of that vlog, you can see the full report by hitting the link below, is that studies show that as with previous outbreaks and pandemics, that the economic recovery has been V-shaped.
Meaning that, since the drop in sales was a quick decline, the recovery will be an equally quick incline. The four biggest financial institutions including Gold man and Sachs and JP Morgan, agree that it will be a V-shaped recovery.
I also did a video on 5 factors that will be preventing this economic down-turn from becoming like the housing crash of 2008, so check that out too, so check that out too on my youtube channel.
First, of all, I want to mention the parameters of my data, compiled for this report. I only gathered the number from single-family homes. I did not take into account other types of properties such as land sales or condo sales.
The reason being I wanted to be able to compare different areas of Nova Scotia, such as the Annapolis Valley and the South Shore, as well as the Halifax Dartmouth area. Now where Halifax Dartmouth has a lot of condo sales, I didn’t want that to be misinterpreted when looking at data from Annapolis Valley and South Shore where there are very few such sales.
I am also including my data broken down week to week and put them in graphs so that you can see and compare areas and trends.
New Listings
For new listings for the week of April 20-26th, 2020 there were 150 single-family homes listed in Nova Scotia overall, 63 in Halifax Dartmouth, 31 in the Annapolis Valley, and 14 on the South Shore.
The only areal that this was an increase from the week before was the Annapolis Valley, which could very well be due to CFB Greenwood and posting season is upon us.
From the same week in 2019, Nova Scotia is down 65%. HD is down 74%, Annapolis Valley has the least amount of decrease at57%, and then the South Shore is down new listings 66%.
We went into this Pandemic with only 3-5 months worth of inventory across NS, so we are still considered to be in a Seller’s market, and many new listings are still selling quickly if priced according to market value for their location.
Some fun things to note, this past week there were 3 new listings priced over 1 million dollars, the highest-priced listing to come on the market this week was in Purcells Cove at $2, 490,000. The highest-priced property listing in the Annapolis Valley area was in Centreville for $649,000 and on the South Shore a property priced at $1, 130,000 were listed in Mason’s Beach.
Currently, there are 91 single-family homes priced over $1 million in Nova Scotia. 82 in the 1-2 million dollar range, 9 in the 2-3 million range, then it jumps to 8 in the $4-7 million range, and then next is the highest-priced listing in Nova Scotia priced at $21 million (You own executive island in Mahone Bay.
For home sales, I have gathered two sets of numbers. The first being confirmed sales. These are sales where the conditions have been met on a property but it has not yet had its closing day. The closed sales are where the property has met the closing day and the purchase funds have changed hands.
As expected, there was a dramatic drop in closed sales for the week of April 6-12, as there were several fallen sales in the 30 days prior when the emergency measure was first put in place due to buyers getting cold feet and financing situations changing.
The following week closed sales jumped back up as these were the buyers that stayed in the game, but then this last week we are seeing a decline again as the buyers and sellers who were previously looking to transact took a step back and so has declined the sales that would have resulted from that period.
Looking at the confirmed sales gives a more current an accurate picture of how the market is looking. Confirmed single-family homes sales are up in Halifax Dartmouth, the South Shore, and Nova Scotia as a whole, but down slightly in the Annapolis Valley.
Because these sales may not officially close for 30 -90 days, by analyzing how many properties with offers on them have their conditions met, we can get more of a real-time look at market activity.
The highest confirmed sale for this past week has been in Halifax for $978,300, while 3 of the 4 highest sales in the valley were in Wolfville with the highest being the Alex Colville house in Wolfville for $574,750.
At this point, home prices are still on the rise from 2019 prices, due to low inventory.
