Ottawa Real Estate Market - June Stats

Welcome to the June 2023 Market Update!

The June stats are in, so it's time for another monthly market update. Where first we're going to take a look at  the year-over-year stats, and then we're going to take a look at the month by month trends, what's really going on Ottawa market and then take a look at those trends to see what we expect to see in the coming months.

So the average price of a home in Ottawa in June 2023 was $634,000; it's only down 1% from the same time last year. The sold-to-list price ratio was 99.2%. So most homes are selling almost at full asking price; that's down 3.25% over June 2022. The unit sold we saw 2,057 homes sell last month in Ottawa, and that's up almost 9% from the same time last year. And the days on market, the average home is selling in about 25.21 days, that's up actually 62% from the same time last year.

So when we take a look at those numbers, we can actually see that because the average days on market were so low last year as most homes were still going in the bidding war process and selling in under a week. So in total inventory, we saw 4,681 active properties at the end of June. That's up almost 12% from the same time last year. The months of inventory  is sitting at about 1.8 months; that's only up about 6% from the same time last year. And the new listings: the new listings we saw 2,758 

that's actually down 14% from the same time last year.

So we actually saw less new listings and more sales in June 2023 compared to June 2022. But when we take a look at the stats year over year, it doesn't really tell us what is specifically going on in the market, so let's dive in and take a look at what's going on month by month. So this is a perfect example of why I love looking at the stats month by month. When you take a look at June 2022 and see the average price is 640 and it's only dropped 1% over the past year, it doesn't tell you the whole picture at all. The market, in fact, has changed significantly month over month. So we can see that where the price was 640 in June of last year it went all the way down to 560 in December and then shot all the way back up to 637 where it peaked in April and it stayed pretty steady over the last few months only dropping about $3,000.

Next up, we have days on market. So taking a look at the days on market and saying that we're up 60% over the same time last year also doesn't really do us justice as we can see that the average home was selling in about 48 days back 

in December and now sitting about 25.2 days, it's a very hot market. When homes are selling under 30 days, we're definitely still in a seller's market.

So now let's take a look at the units sold where we're going to see our first hint that we might not be in such a hot market soon and then we might be in the beginning of a shift. So as you can see, we did sell more homes in June 2023 than we did in June 2022, but we also sold less homes than we did in May 2023 than we did in June 2023. So this is going to be the first hint where we're going to see signs that the market is starting to slow down.

Next up, our sold-to-list price. So as I mentioned in the introduction talking about days on market and why homes were selling so fast because of bidding wars, you'll see the same thing Illustrated in the sold-to-ask ratio. The average home is selling for 1.2% of its asking price because homes were priced low for bidding wars. Then we've seen the market stabilize out to where we're sitting today at almost 100% of asking price, again indicating that we're in a very hot market.

And now for the fun part, where I actually get to speculate on what I'm expecting to see in the market over the next couple months. While we are expecting to see sales drop, how that affects the market is going to have a big impact on how many new listings we get if we continue to see so few listings, then we won't really see the market change too much, but we aren't talking about a new change in the market that we have seen, and that is interest rates.

Interest rates have been increasing over the last couple months we do have another announcement next week from the Bank of Canada talking about the overnight rate but a big change in the market has actually been the fixed rates the fixed rates have come up significantly over the past two months so people who were not approved before that rate hike are going to see their buying power go down quite a bit and as the pre-approvals expire as these people buy homes and the new pre-approvals come in, I expect that we are going to see effect on the market and on the purchase price but to dive in a little deeper on this I'm going to bring into mortgage specialists on the next blog so we can break down what is going on with the Bank of Canada rates which mostly affects the variable rate and why the fixed rate has come up significantly more than the variable rate over the last couple months and what really dictates the fixed-term rate.

In the pandemic, we saw most people go variable because it was so much lower than the fixed rate, where now we're seeing more people go fixed because the major difference is in reverse between the fixed and the variable.

And like always, we're not talking about specific neighborhoods or about specific types of properties where the market could be very different from what the average home and the overall market are doing. The overall Market is driven by the majority of homes that are selling, which typically are in the same range of price and are affected most by the interest rate hikes as everyone is fighting for the same approval rating, but as we get more specific and different types of properties, they're less affected by the overall market or the interest rates, and if you want to learn more about that, you can send me a message directly to find out what's going on in your neighborhood or to find out what's going on with the type of property that you're looking to purchase.

Like always, thanks for reading our blog. I hope you guys found this helpful, but if you didn't, I'd still like to know. Shoot me a message and let me know what it is that you would find helpful, because there are probably other people just like you out there that are wondering the same thing. If you guys let me know what you want to know, I'll make sure I write a blog about it in the future.

But first, stay tuned for our next blog, where we're going to dive deep into mortgages, what we've seen happen, what we're expecting to see in the future, and of course, what it means for you.