Canadian home hunters face the tightest market ever recorded Housing News

There are so few homes for sale in Canada that people are starting to call the housing crisis.

The unprecedented real estate craze has left Canada with the fewest homes for sale in at least a quarter of a century.

The country had about 86,000 homes for sale at the end of December, seasonally adjusted, according to the Canadian Real Estate Association. That’s after buyers bought a record 667,000 homes in 2021, about 20% more than the previous year’s record.

With the end of the offer, reference house prices rose by 2.5% in December compared to the previous month, a record 26.6% year-on-year.

“There are fewer properties for sale today than there are at any time registered in Canada,” Shaun Cathcart, a senior real estate economist, said in a press release accompanying the data. “So, bottom line is that we’re really looking forward to housing. It’s likely to get worse before it gets better.”

National numbers follow the trend seen earlier this month in Canada’s most expensive housing markets, Toronto and Vancouver, where available housing stock has fallen to unprecedented levels. This has reinforced the fact that a national shortage is driving up price increases, and the cost of housing is unavailable to many Canadians working in major cities, regardless of whether they buy or rent.

More and more, the so-called housing crisis is pushing politicians to start looking for answers. The reference home price in Canada is C $ 811,700 (approximately $ 648,000)

“Politicians have started to say the right things, but they need to act to change the way we are doing now,” Cathcart of the real estate committee said. “It is the aggressive national drive to build more housing that will solve the problem, but it will probably have to be more than anything we have ever done. A touch on the situation will not cut it.”

Meanwhile, with so little left to buy across Canada, the pace of sales is slowing. The number of monthly transactions changed slightly from December to November, although this was enough for the second highest number of sales recorded in the last month of the year.