This report examines pre-owned single family home sales activity in the core area of Victoria (Victoria, Oak Bay, Esquimalt, View Royal, and Saanich) for the last two years, ending November 30, 2008.
As with the condominium market, sales were down and listings were up. The extent of the changes is summarized in the Year Over Year Comparison and the Three Month Comparison Charts, below.
The chart to the right shows cumulative listings and sales for the previous 12 month. The extreme left side of the Chart shows totals for December 2006 to November 2007, and the 12 month cumulative total become progressively more recent as you move from left to right.
As you can see, listings increased quite steadily each month until November 2008, when they began to tail off a bit. Likewise, sales decreased fairly steadily throughout the year, although sales for November were down markedly.
The first chart below offers an overview of listings and sales each month for the past 24 months. Do you see any patterns here? Quite clearly not many home owners feel much inclined to put their homes on the market in December. But once the holiday season is over, stand back! It’s going to be interesting to see whether the same enthusiasm to list will repeat itself in early ‘09.
The next three charts deal with price changes. First, changes to median price, measured monthly and as a three month rolling average (For a discussion of median prices, see my earlier articvle – Median Home Values Explained). Second, average prices are charted, both monthly and for three month rolling averages. And the third chart compares average selling prices with assessed values for the corresponding period – again, monthly and three month rolling figures are used.
As we saw in the condo report, the current downward trend in both median and average prices seems to have begun around May of this year.
Did you notice that the Average Sale Price to Assessed value multiple began to decline exactly in January? It did the same in January 2007 too. This shouldn’t be surprising, since January 1 is the effective date of the annual revision to assessed values. Except for January 2009 – a few weeks ago the BC government announced it would use last year’s assessed value for 2009 too!
Before leaving the Listing Price to Assessed Value multiple, did you notice the significant difference between 2007 and 2008? In 2007, this multiple bottomed out around April or May and then began a slow but steady climb upwards. But in 2008, the trend so far has continued steadily downward. We’ll need to keep an eye on that as we go forward.
The final four graphs are intended to examine whether certain measurements of market performance might be useful in attempting to identify changes in market trends in a timely fashion.
The trend lines for these four graphs are all consistent since the April/May time frame. In particular, the three month rolling average of all of these measurements all began to slope in the same direction. Interestingly, exactly the same seems to hold true for May, 2007. Further analysis is definitely needed!
That’s it for November. Hopefully this report helps to visualize the changes that are taking place in the market. I’ll be back next month with an update.
Bye for now,
...Victoria's blogging real estate professional.
Tags: Victoria Home Market Report, Victoria Property Values, Victoria Real Estate
