Is January the best time to buy a home?
By Sam R on Jan 18, 2017
Were you among the savvy purchasers who got onto the real estate ladder yesterday? The Toronto Real Estate firm TheRedPin says January 17th is the single best day to buy a home in Toronto, with buyers saving an average of $60,000 and experiencing fewer bidding wars.
The company analyzed data on more than 650,000 home sales and decided yesterday was the cheapest day of the year, a calm of sorts to precede a price-spike storm it says will come in February. August, they say, is the second-cheapest month.
The firm’s data says sale prices averaged $498,925 in January for 2010 through 2016, compared to a $533,379 February average in the same years. May is the height of the spring market, with average prices hitting more than $565,000.
The Financial Post reports some dissent to TheRedPin’s findings, via mortgage broker Vince Gaetano, who says that the real deals are still to come; just after Thanksgiving, he says he sees “a high level of marital breakups” that increases market supply. “When you have a high number of marital breakups, between Thanksgiving and Christmas is where the opportunity to buy begins. When people want to move on, they are motivated to get a deal done and won’t haggle on price,” Gaetano says in the Post.
Macabre maybe, but those unlucky folk were going to split up anyway, so you may as well get the best deal you can, I suppose. There’s still plenty of time left in January, too, and common sense would tell you that the buying pool will be smaller than in the spring, simply because even those of us who do venture outside between December and April would rather be skiing than house-shopping.
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By no coincidence, rents are on the rise too, with condo rents up 11.7% in the last quarter of the year to nearly $2,000 a month for an average of just over 700 square feet according to Urbanation.
In the city core, up 12% over last year, the same condo could cost you more than $2,100. Prices were likewise up in the one-time suburbs of Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough ($1,857), and the surrounding 905 (up to $1,739). Even at those prices, the average condo spent only about 13 days listed before finding a tenant, down a week from the same period last year.
Exacerbating the strain on the rental market were a variety of factors including the move to Ontario by a number of out-of-work Albertans and last spring’s construction trades strike, which set builders back in adding to the supply of new-build condos.
We may not be about to set any new records, but if 2016 showed us anything, it’s that all things are possible. With an uncertain impact on the Canadian market as a result of the enormous changes afoot to the south and the UK’s imminent exit from the EU, I’ll be eagerly watching it unfold.
