February Sales: Seller’s Market

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Real estate prices remained strong in February this year, pushing the value of the “typical” Westmount home over the $2.7 million mark, as volume inched up from 11 sales in January to 13 in February. This despite the fact the market is still very tight, so the result is an upturn in prices in what is definitely a seller’s market.

A detached stone house on The Boulevard sold for $5,575,000, the highest price of the month — and, for that matter, the highest price so far this year — bringing the average of the 13 February sales to almost $2.5 million, with seven sales over $2 million and six between $1,400,000 and $1,780,000. Two of the month’s sales were less than 10 percent mark-ups over valuation, while two others were over 60 percent mark-ups. None sold below municipal value.

If Westmount’s house market is getting stronger, it appears the condominium market just died off, with only five sales so far this year compared to 21 in the fourth quarter of 2021. With one condo sale in January and four more in February, only two cleared the million-dollar mark, including a two-storey apartment at 200 Lansdowne Ave. and a townhouse in the Westmount Railway Station project. Thanks largely to another sale at 200 Lansdowne, well below valuation while the other four sales ranged from 42.5 to 65.8 percent mark-ups, the average mark-up was only 29.5 percent, but still a slight improvement over the 26.0 percent average for all of last year.

The mid-March count of houses on the market is up slightly to 64 houses available,. basically the same count at this time last year, but those numbers pale badly in relation to the 97 available at the same time in 2020 or the 90 at the same time in 2019. New listings usually come on in the next few months for spring sales, so we can expect inventory to increase. In January this year three houses took less than 10 days to sell and in February there were two more, so while fast sales are not commonplace, the market its hungry for new inventory and will eat up anything that is properly priced.

Posted by andy Posted in: Monthly Analysis No Comments » February 2022

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