While May is usually a strong month for home sales, the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) said on Wednesday that the volume of home sales fell sharply during the month, down 20 percent from the same period last year. a year ago. The slowdown means home sales are finally returning to pre-COVID-19 levels, the real estate group said. Following the cooling in March and April 2020 as the pandemic unfolded, the Canadian housing market recovered sharply, with sales prices and sales volumes hitting record highs for most of the past two years. But that momentum has shifted significantly in recent months as lending rates that fell early in the pandemic began to rise, making mortgages more expensive and reducing buyers’ purchasing power. CREA says the median price of a home sold in the multi-deposit service last month was $ 711,000. This is more than 13 percent lower than the all-time high of $ 816,720 set in February 2022. “Ultimately this has been expected and predicted for quite some time – a slowdown to more normal levels of sales activity and a flattening of prices,” CREA chief economist Shaun Cathcart said in a statement. CREA says the average price can be misleading because it is easily distorted by sales in large expensive markets such as Toronto and Vancouver. So he calculates another number, known as the Housing Price Index (HPI), which he says is the best meter on the market because it adjusts to the volume and types of housing. The index fell 0.8 percent a month, CREA said, after falling 1.1 percent in April. However, it is still more than 19 percent higher than it was last year, mainly due to the impressive gains observed at the end of 2021. The same can be said for the average price, which is still 3.4 percent higher than it was a year ago, despite the three monthly reductions in a row.

If Toronto and Vancouver are subtracted from the numbers, the average price of a Canadian home sold in May was $ 588,500. The biggest factor driving the national number lower is Ontario, where most markets are seeing significant price reductions. Vancouver Island saw prices rise, while Vancouver remained stable and the rest of BC. fell for the most part. “Prices were more or less stable in the meadows except for small gains in Saskatoon and Winnipeg,” CREA said. “Meanwhile, Quebec, New Brunswick and PEI continued to outperform with significant gains, while prices in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador rose slightly.”