April 2022 Newsletter | Sellers Market Continues Even as New Buyers Continue to Enter the Market

Sellers Market Continues Even as New Buyers Continue to Enter the Market

With the low inventory levels continuing we are continuing to enjoy working hard to find our buyers their Canmore home while helping sellers successfully navigate this market. As the calendar moves through April, we are starting to see the snow lower down the mountain start to melt making way for some great walking/hiking and running while the skiing is winding down. There is nothing quite like enjoying the longer days with blue sky and beautiful snow covered peaks, it reminds us all every day why we love living here.

The first quarter of 2022 was very strong for sales with total sales being 64% more than the 4 pre pandemic first quarters of the year. Q1 2022 sales volume was very strong, being 64% higher than the 4 previous pre pandemic Q1 sale volumes from 2018-2021. It was however 37% less than the all time record sales volume Q1 2021 but we do feel that was driven more by the lack of supply than lack of buyers.

We seem to be discussing the active listing supply a lot with clients so let’s get into that. Over the last 5 months we have seen an average total listing in Canmore be 77 compared to the average active listing since we started keeping statistics being at 240. The highest active listing count was over 500 and the lowest was a tie between January and February of this year at 56. The part of this that most people do not realize is when we had the 524 active listings was in 2011 at a time when we did not have nearly the number of homes in Canmore.

When we look at other metrics like List to Sales Ratio along with Months of Inventory, we continue to see the same story. For List to Sales Ratio, we can track the amount of negotiation on average taking place and what percentage of the asking price is the accepted offer landing at. In 2022 all months are above 100% which has only ever happened in one other month since we have been calculating this. The average list to sale ratio for the first quart of 2022 is 102.08%. For months of inventory, it is how many months of the current sales activity would it take to sell all the existing inventory as of the 1st of the month. We typically see numbers around 3 to 6 months of inventory as being a balanced market with numbers higher than 6 months being a buyer’s market and lower than 3 months of inventory being a seller’s market. Our current months of inventory is 1.19.

As you will see in the graphs our average prices have been steadily increasing in all categories (except lots which is due to such a small sample size) and we do expect to see this continue until our supply increases. We have also been hearing of solid numbers coming in from the short term rental complexes which makes sense with more people starting to travel and take in everything Canmore and Banff have to offer.

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