Image Credit: SUBMITTED/BC Assessment
There’s no question that home buyers and sellers had a rough ride in 2022.
The market started heating up – along with significant price increases – in 2021 as the COVID-inspired work-from-home trend took off.
Buyers were looking for bigger homes out of major cities and the Thompson-Okanagan region benefited by that influx and sales reached record levels in 2021.
READ MORE: 2021 best year ever recorded for Kamloops real estate sales
While the demand surged for homes, the supply dried up as many people were reluctant to sell for fear of having nowhere to buy and bidding wars were the norm.
That also means that prices rose dramatically.
READ MORE: These realtors think auctioning houses is best for buyers and sellers in Kamloops, Okanagan
Things started to change on March 1, 2022 when the Bank of Canada raised its overnight rate by a quarter of a percentage point to 0.5%, the first increase in a year.
That came as the start of the battle against historically high inflation. The benchmark rate reached 4.25% in December. It may go up again when the Bank of Canada makes its next adjustment on Jan 25.
What that meant for sales and prices was slightly different in Kelowna than Kamloops.
In Dec 2021, the benchmark or typical price for a single-family home in the Central Okanagan was $1,004,900 and there were only 256 such houses for sale.
It took, on average, 36 days to sell a house that month.
By December 2022, the benchmark price had dropped but only by $2,400. On the other hand, it took 64 days for a house to sell.
It’s what happened in between that created the roller coaster.
Prices climbed steadily until they reached a peak of $1,131,800 in May. They’ve dropped steadily through to a low of $981,800 in October before recovering somewhat in November and December.
In terms of days to sell, that dropped to a mere 22 days in March and April before gradually climbing to 64 days in December.
The housing stock also stated climbing from that December 2021 low of 256 to a high of 1,126 in July. It’s now on a downward trend, reaching 679 in December.
The picture in Kamloops is complicated by some data gaps as the Kamloops real estate association joined the Association of Interior Realtors early in the year and used different databases.
The Kamloops association didn’t use benchmark prices so iNFOnews.ca used average prices, which are often higher than the benchmark but fluctuate more dramatically.
Those show a peak for the average single-family home price in Kamloops was in February at $820,850. The peaked in May at $820,990 then prices started a slow decline to reach $672,079 in December.
That means the average price drop in Kamloops from the May high was more than $148,900. The drop from peak to current in Kelowna was $129,400.
Kamloops started 2022 with houses selling in 34 days, on average. That held fairly steady through the spring then started rising in July to peak at 70 days in September.
The number of housing units for sale also climbed from 508 in February to 1,414 in October before dropping to 1,324 in December.
“Although inventory levels remain tight, the high interest rates will continue to subdue market activity in the coming months.” Interior Real Estate Association President Lyndi Cruickshank said in a news release last week.
READ MORE: Real estate sales and prices drop in Okanagan, Kamloops in December
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