TODAYS REAL ESTATE IN A NUTSHELL
Contributed by: Jay Lough Hayes, Sales Representative Re/Max Rouge River Realty Ltd. 705-772-1025
“Average home price in Peterborough soars 32.5% in a year to $398,734.” (March 2017) “Average home price in Peterborough is $433,902.” (February 2019) (Peterborough Examiner) This had to stop. Prices were running ramped with a dozen multiple offers on just about every property listed. Even though prices have slowed, the multiple offers have not. Peterborough, unlike most of Canada, realizes a property listed is a property SOLD. Real estate agents have realized a clean, staged and well presented home isn’t enough. Pricing a property below what the home should sell for is now normal. This low price, accompanied by location and staging, nets an over asking sale, selling for around what the house should have been priced at to start. We are seeing fewer listings asking good, qualified buyers to wait a week to submit offers. Many buyers simply won’t wait, they are tired of playing that game. Buyers will pay top dollar since there is such a shortage of new inventory. Peterborough has a unique problem with very little new home builds coming to market. The buyers who want the new home either go out of the market or buy a resale. This incline, which happens when someone buys a new home leaving behind their resale to be purchased, just isn’t happening here. The reasons are varied, with a large pile of dirt left waiting on Lily Lake Rd slated for nearly 3,000 new homes. With the 407 nearing completion, and the influx of new immigrants needing homes, Peterborough remains the fastest growing community in Canada. People older than 65 make up 22.2% of Peterborough population. Peterborough’s current housing vacancy rate is just 0.4%, while the cost of real estate continues to climb. No new highrise apartment buildings are Page 42
on the books to be built, and if any, developers are building and then converting to condos. As the city realized the affordable housing shortage, plans and bylaws came in to allow basement apartments. Toronto buyers swooped in with money to spend and purchased bungalows, usually the easiest to convert into two homes. All is well, except to cover all the costs of mortgage for a property they may have overpaid for, the cost to rent one a renovated apartment remains out of reach for many tenants. We see these tenants either move to a nearby, more affordable towns, or stay and struggle to pay their rent. On a brighter note, our jobless rate fell to 4.9% in December. As real estate agents, we too often hear from the Peterborough seller, “We’ll just wait for a Toronto buyer to give us our asking price or more”, leaving the local buyers just staying put. The Toronto buyer isn’t moving here, the local would-be buyer would have moved, offering a new listing to perhaps another local buyer. In September, the average sale price of a house in the city and County of Peterborough soared to an all-time high of $448,993. In February, sales are up 5.1%, the average home price is $433,902 with 233 new residential listings. This is well below the long-term average of around 350 listings for the month. But is home ownership attainable here? In the new federal budget, buyers will be able to tap up to $35,000 of their RRSP (up from $25,000) for a home purchase. But how does this apply to the Bank of Canada “Stress Test” created to slow
