This report examines pre-owned condominium 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.
It comes as a surprise to no one that sales were down and listings were up – we’ve been hearing that for several months now. The following two charts depict listings and sales: the first one is year to year (that is, 12 month period to 12 month period); the second compares the most recent three month totals with the corresponding figures for the previous two years.
The year over year increase in listings (up 240) and decrease in sales (down 457) are interesting. It’s also interesting to track how and when those changes occurred.
That’s what the graph to the right tries to capture. It compares the most recent 12 month period with the earlier one, but in a month-to-month cumulative fashion. In other words, the figures for December are the differences between December this year and December last year, listings and sales. Move to the right one month and the next points on the graph show the cumulative total changes (listings and sales) for December and January together. And so on, from left to right.
So what this graphs shows is that generally speaking, the yearly increase in listings and decrease in sales was spread out more or less evenly throughout the year, although listings flattened out around September and October, and started to tail off modestly in November.
As to pricing, the following two charts show median and average sale prices, in two different ways: monthly, and a three month rolling average. I use the rolling average to smooth out the radical month to month changes: taken alone, monthly figures bounce around too much to usefully show any changing trends. The rolling average is more useful for that.
For the reasons I mentioned in an earlier post (Median Home Values Explained), I place more reliance on median prices than average prices. Frequently median and average prices move in the same direction, but as the charts show, that isn’t always the case.
These two charts show clearly that price wise, the market began to decline in or around May this year and has been in decline since. November showed a marked downward price movement, so it will be interesting to see whether that accelerated pace of decline continues in December, or whether it flattens out a bit.
The final three graphs attempt to see if there is any correlation between other statistical data and the price trend graphs above. From about April or May 2008, the general slope of all three graphs is roughly consistent with the price trends for the same time period. Beyond that, I don’t see any useful correlation – maybe you see it otherwise?
The interesting thing about the Days on Market (DOM) graph is even back in late 2006 when more sales were taking place, DOM was relatively high.
That’s about it for condo data. I’ll be back next month with an update. Later this month I will do a similar report for pre-owned single family homes in the same core area.
Bye for now,
...Victoria's blogging real estate professional.
Tags: Victoria Condos
[...] we saw in the condo report, the current downward trend in both median and average prices seems to have begun around May of [...]