Once a seasonal cottage community, the demand for people looking for housing in Shediac, N.B., far outstrips the supply.
Realtor Heather FitzGerald says she’s never seen anything like it in her 16-year career.
“We’ve got in the Shediac are right now just residential detached homes, only 21 homes on the market, and a lot of those are new construction,” she said in an interview on Tuesday.
Once you set foot in the coastal town, you can see new construction or advertisements for upcoming residential construction everywhere you look.
It’s been a record-breaking year, according to Shediac mayor Roger Caissie. “We used to get around 12 to 15 million dollars in permits. In 2018, new record, $25 million,” he said, explaining commercial construction brought the numbers up that year.
“We equalled the $25 million in 2020, at the start of the pandemic. 2021, by the end of October, we’d surpassed that by leaps and bounds, we hit $54 million.”
In 2023, the neighbouring municipalities of Pointe-du-Chêne, Scoudouc and Shediac Cape will become part of Shediac, giving the town more land to offer developers.
That’s good news for buyers according to FitzGerald, who said more and more people are starting to hold off on selling due to the newest developments in the pandemic.
“What we’re seeing in the Shediac area right now is a lot of people migrating from Ontario, Quebec, B.C., wanting to migrate somewhere that is just outside the city limits. They all want to be within that 20- to 30-minute range to a city centre,” she said, adding roughly 60 per cent of buyers in Shediac are from out of province.
She explained other communities close to Moncton like Salisbury are also in high demand with out-of-province buyers.
“I’ve seen upward of 25 offers on a property,” she said of Shediac.
The hot real estate market is bringing changes to the community.
“We’re seeing more of a business community that’s operating year-round, whether that’s in hospitality or that’s in other services as well,” Caissie said, noting the residential development was resulting in more commercial development.
When asked if environmental impact was being taken into account with all the development, he said that part of Main Street would be redone next year to address sewage system overflows and that there were many new environmental related requirements imposed on developers.
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