March Sales: Getting Ready

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The coming of spring does not seem to have spurred Westmount’s real estate market — yet — but there are signs of life at the lower end of the market which might percolate as we get further into the spring.

Local agents are reporting 10 residential sales agreed to in March and posted another four sales for February, which now sets the total volume for that month at 11, including one house going for more than $5 million. The March list’s highest price was just under $3,500,000 while the lowest involved a house on Burton Ave., selling for $750,000, by far the lowest price for a Westmount house this year (though there is another house nearby which is asking less than that). The average of the 10 sales was $1,985,800, a raw average matched in December last year but otherwise the lowest since November of 2023 and one of very few averages to be below $2 million since the middle of 2018.

The average mark-up over valuation in March was only 1.8 percent, with two double-digit mark-downs as low as 19.4 percent,. and two similar mark-ups, at 16.3 and 16.4 percent.

In overall terms, it would seem the market is getting ready to produce a good spring market, with a sharp drop in the number of houses listed between $1 and $2 million (from 43 to 31) and a similar increase in those asking between $2 and $4 million, which might be pushing up prices at the lower end of the scale. Total residential listings in mid-April numbered 129, down by four in the last month, as demand increases the spring market.

Agents announced the sale of one $3 million condominium in March, whose five condo sales brought the total for the first quarter of 2025 to 15, going down to $650,000 for a lower-floor condo at 1 Wood Ave., which also brought the biggest mark-down for a condo in the first quarter at -33.6 percent. The next-lowest price was for part of a duplex on Burton Ave., $812,000, which represented the highest mark-up of the quarter for condos, at 65.5 percent.

Adjacent-Westmount, which reported exactly zero sales in January, began to revive in February and March, with four and six sales, respectively, in eastern Notre Dame de Grâce and the Trafalgar-Daulac area, but none 9n the tracts north or southeast of Westmount, nor the “Golden Square Mile,” so we might expect more activity in adjacent areas as the spring blossoms. So far this year the agents have posted 10 house rentals in a range between $4,800 and $9,825, with another 20 available for rent.

Posted by andy Posted in: Monthly Analysis No Comments » March 2025