June Sales: Looking for Listings

Download the Graph

The Westmount real estate market appears ready for the rebound, but agents still have work to do to regain the confidence of sellers, as protocols for showing houses and negotiating prices are slowly getting worked out. Demand appears to be outstripping supply, as nine houses were sold, but it seems new listings are not coming on fast enough to refill the tanks. The number of houses listed for sale dropped from 100 to 91, so we can at least say there is very little new stock from week to week. In fact, the house rental market is becoming more and more popular.

The nine home sales in June involve prices from $1,305,000 to $4,500,000, with four of the nine over $2 million and an average price of $2,205,822. Besides those, a late May (May 30) posting was $5,850,000, showing that the high end of the market is hardly dead, while the $1,305,000 paid for a row-house on Prince Albert Ave. is the second-lowest price so far this year. In fact, that sale also represented the highest mark-up over municipal valuation in June, at 51.1 percent, while the $4,500,000 sale was almost 12 percent less than its tax value, lowest ratio of the month and one of only two mark-downs. Average mark-up for June was only 8.8 percent based on the new 2020 valuations, very similar to the 9.7 percent in May, an indication prices might be “bottoming out.”

But agents are still looking for listings. Almost all of the June sales (seven of nine) were houses that had been listed since the pandemic rules were modified to allow houses to be shown; one house sold in six days and another in 10. So yes, the market is hot and definitely a seller’s market for the moment. The volume is the lowest for a June since 2005, though it is an improvement since March and April at the peak of the COVID-19 shutdown.

Four sales of condominiums in June rounded out the second quarter of 2020, when seven sales ranged in price from $625,000 to $3,200,000, (the latter for a penthouse at 1 Wood Ave.), and prices were 37.9 percent above valuation, much higher than for one- and two-family dwellings. Only one condo sale price was less than municipal valuation. The May-June sales (there were none in April) included three which had been listed before the shutdown began, the rest sold in an average 14.5 days.

And while the number of available listings at last check showed a decline, the number of available house rentals is up from 27 to 30, five of them asking more than $10,000 per month. To date there have been 17 houses rented at rates from $3,650 to $8,800 per month.

The adjacent-Westmount market was nearly at a standstill in June, with the exception of two houses in eastern Notre Dame de Grâce, one share of a duplex in NDG and an apartment at the Gleneagles, 3940 Côte des Neiges Rd.

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