Toronto Real Estate Market Update - preliminary
Real estate markets in the Toronto area has far surpassed expectations in the first half of the year with just over 50,000 sales posted in the months of January to June. Going into July the activity seems to have decreased some what. This is to be expected slightly as many people flee the city for vacations to cottages or other more exotic locals, in order to escape the everyday life of a 9 to 5er's (or what ever hours one calls a work day).
This tends to have the biggest effect on the higher priced homes as the people most able to afford them are also the people who are most able to afford a cottage where they would rather be, rather than shuffling from house to house looking for the one that is significantly better than their current home, at a reasonable price.
The unadjusted sales numbers for July, (1st to 9:30am July 30th) is 8643 homes that were sold firm. This number is likely to be higher than the official numbers, posted by the Toronto Real Estate Board in the end of the first week of August, as they may contain some duplicate listings or land listings that were improperly categorized on the MLS® system. (sorry I do not have the access to perform those types of filters). This represents an increase of 22% over July 2006's 7082 homes sold through the Toronto MLS® system.
The
Toronto real estate sales volume for homes in June was 10,451 which means that July's sales are 17.3% less than in June. This may seem like a lot, but in 2006 the decrease was 18.9% and at the time we were calling it a very strong sales month.
It looks like we could be expecting close to, if not over 90,000 sales by the end of the year with steady price increases of as much as 5% over the previous year.
I will update you when the official numbers are posted.
