By Michael McCann
It was a curious July as it was one of the busiest I have experienced in years. It seems that home buyers did not take a holiday and were continuing to purchase houses.
We all know that nothing happens in isolation and there was a key factor in buyer motivation. We heard in June that the CMHC was taking an active step to cool the housing market and had informed banks and large lenders that it was capping guarantees on mortgage-backed securities.
Impact of CMHC move
What does this means to home buyers? With the tightening of credit conditions, the CMHC will only be allowing banks to assume $350 million each month.
Most likely we will see a jump in mortgage rates this fall of between 0.2 to 0.65 percentage points. How this will translate to the consumer is an increase in mortgage rates offered by the banks.
So those buyers who had pre-approved rates from their lenders certainly wanted to purchase at their lower rates as opposed to renewing their pre-approval in September or October at a higher interest rate.
Let me give you the big picture to illustrate the unfolding housing situation. Jim Flaherty said this year the CMHC can have 85 billion in mortgage-backed securities for the year and as of July the banks had already used 66 Billion.
Now a quick look at our July real estate statistics.
Birchcliff – Cliffside Home Sales in July 2013 – 25 homes sold
Source: Toronto Real Estate Board all sold homes excludes commercial properties, condos and vacant land
Birchcliff/Cliffside
- July 2012 there were 23 homes sold while July of this year 25 homes changed hands – increase of 11%
- July of 2012 the average sold price was $489,087 while July 2013 the average sold price came in at $570,496 – Increase of 17%
- July 2012 it took on average 19 days to sell a home and this July it took only 16 days
Toronto Real Estate Board
- 7,338 sales in July 2012 with July 2013 showing 8,544 sales – Up by 16.4%
- $475,523 average selling price July 2012 with July 2013 coming in at $513,246 – Up by 7.9%
- July 2012 it took an average of 26 days to sell a home and it was the same in July of this year the same
Canadian Real Estate Association
- July 2013 home sales were up by 9.4% from July of 2012
- The national average home sale price was up 8.4% year over year based upon July
Sales were up in all markets, however the key driver to most of this summer activity was clearly generated by the CMHC changes.
For a look at local real estate prices over the last six months, click on the tabs.
[tabs slidertype=”top tabs”] [tabcontainer] [tabtext]June[/tabtext] [tabtext]May[/tabtext] [tabtext]April[/tabtext] [tabtext]March[/tabtext] [tabtext]February[/tabtext] [tabtext]January[/tabtext] [/tabcontainer] [tabcontent] [tab]Birchcliff – Cliffside Home Sales in June 2013 – 22 homes sold [/tab] [tab]Birchcliff – Cliffside Home Sales in May 2013 – 46 homes sold [/tab] [tab]Birchcliff – Cliffside Home Sales in April 2013 – 45 homes sold [/tab] [tab]Birchcliff – Cliffside Home Sales in March 2013 – 36 homes sold [/tab] [tab]Birch Cliff – Cliffside Home Sales in February 2013 – 23 homes sold [/tab] [tab]Birch Cliff – Cliffside Home Sales in January 2013 – 18 homes sold [/tab] [/tabcontent] [/tabs]
According to the Toronto Real Estate Board, our local housing market is defined as Birch Cliff/Cliffside and the boundaries can be seen below.
View Birch Cliff / Cliffside in a larger map
