After house prices skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Kingston, Ont., housing market appears to be showing signs of cooling off.
Real estate brokers say house prices have fallen in recent months but is it enough to make home buying affordable?
Real estate broker Matt Lee says the average median price of a house is around $606,000, down from $651,000 earlier this year.
“So the average is still over asking price by about two per cent to two-point-five per cent, but it was up to as high as 14, 15 per cent over asking price as an average,” said Lee, who works with Royal LePage ProAlliance Realty.
Lee cites a few reasons why housing prices are starting to decline – the hike in interest rates, general inflation, and a simple change in supply and demand.
“What we’re looking at is a supply-and-demand shift, a little bit. We’re seeing more inventory, we’re seeing probably relatively the same amount of buyers. We have a number of people that started their springtime buy early,” he said.
Meanwhile, in some rural areas, local brokers are saying they’re not seeing much of a decline in listing prices.
In Bancroft, while housing prices aren’t cooling, the frantic buying in that area has tapered off.
“The piece of the market I’ve seen cool is the timing. We’re still seeing things being listed based on part of the frenzy, but what we’re experiencing is that things are staying on the market a little longer than they used to,” said Valerie Miles, a ReMax real estate agent.
Over the past couple of years, Miles said, she has seen the migration from cities to a rural area like Bancroft.
She believes that buyers will still continue to migrate, and they’ll have options when they do decide to buy.
“I still think buyers are still going to come into rural areas. I still think they’re going to move out of the GTA. I think that people are still going to retire to different parts of the province. That’s a trend we saw happening during COVID, and I don’t think that will slow,” she added.
So while the price of nearly everything seems to be on the rise, home buyers can at least hope that a cooling real estate market will continue.