April Sales: Pass

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How does one make a statistic out of a single sale? In a month which normally has 18 sales, among the busiest times of year for Westmount agents, only one sale was posted in April at a price of $1,977,000 — about average for the year and 28 percent above its municipal evaluation, higher than the average for 2020, so pushing up the adjusted value on our graph. The problem is, the sample is so small that the figure is almost meaningless, except to say that prices are not plummeting.

The encouraging development is that agents are going to be allowed to resume working for their clients in mid-May, so hopefully volume will at least ramp up to give us a better picture of supply and demand. When the pandemic will end, and what happens to mobility, technology and employment — especially in areas like teaching and medicine which have always been so important to Westmount real estate — are among the topics to be pondered over the next couple of months.

The number of house listings dipped from 98 in mid-April to 96 in May, but probably will increase as agents come out of hiding. This may tend to push down prices if supply expands too quickly.

One house sale on Cedar Crescent was the only transaction in adjacent-Westmount in the month of April, with a much lower-than-average mark-up over valuation, but again, one sale is not enough to read a market. Only two houses in eastern Notre Dame de Grâce, both on Marlowe Ave., have reportedly sold in the first four months of 2020, compared to 14 in the same time period last year. For the Circle Road/Cedar Crescent sector, the number only dropped from six to five.

Westmount has logged some 32 sales in all of 2020 so far, compared with 40 in the first four months last year, an indication volume was really picking up before the market came to a screeching halt in mid-March.

Posted by andy Posted in: Monthly Analysis No Comments » April 2020