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The July activity comes as no surprise, says Phil Soper, president and CEO of Royal LePage.
“If you go back to the first quarter when we released our 2020 first-quarter forecast, we said there would be a drop during the lockdown, not knowing how long the lockdown would last,” says Soper. “But when markets reopened again, we had such a strong pull ahead from the first quarter and we knew that demand would be there, and then you add to it the extra demand particularly from first-time home buyers because of the significant drop in retail mortgage rates and we had that surge.”
Soper expects prices to rise slightly through to the end of summer, but activity will cool in the fall, which it traditionally does.
“We said prices would fall on a short-term basis but then on a year-over-year basis, they’ll rise,” he says. “The third part of the forecast hasn’t played itself out yet, which is we expect things to cool by October and the fourth quarter as that surge demand is satiated but things are unfolding at a more vigorous rate than we anticipated.”
Year-over-year comparisons of key Edmonton statistics.
July 2020 July 2019
Sales 2,498 2,138
Dollar volume 943.6 790.9
New listings 3,799 3,526
Average price $377,729 $369,934
SNLR* 48.9 47.3
*sales to new listing ratio
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