Impact of COVID-19 on the Real Estate Market

We hope you are staying safe and healthy! We wanted to give a quick update on what is happening in the Guelph real estate market. We are mid way through April and now 1 month past the announcement of COVID19 being a pandemic. We are continuing to see the impact on our Real Estate Market.

The biggest change so far has been the reduction in market activity and sales volume. The number of new listings is down by 30% from the pre-pandemic and sales are down 69%.

Sale price to list price ratio has dropped from 102% to 99%, which means we are experiencing more negotiating and less multiple offer situations. There are more conditions in offers right now. Having said that 99% is still a very high list to sale price ratio meaning people are giving their houses away.

The median sale price for the first half of April is down 9.4% from the first half of March. However most of this drop is because the majority of the houses selling are smaller, lower priced homes which is pulling down the median sale price If you look at the median sale price per square foot it is only down by 1.5%. Also, to put things in perspective the median sale price is still up 7% from April 2019.

Showing activity has started to increase over the last 2 weeks which might mean that we see an increase in sales volume in the second half of April. The number of cases for COVID19 does appear to be levelling off both in Canada and the US which could lead to more consumer confidence in the real estate market. There does seem to be some light at the end of the tunnel.

If you have any questions about the real estate market please reach out to us at the GoWylde team.