April Sales: Hesitating

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The Westmount real estate market is still uncertain about the current economic climate in Montreal, but volume has evened out and at lerast two buyers were willing to pay $2 million-plus for local homes, with two others close behind in the $1.9 million range.Still, that wasn’t enough to push up the average price from March and markups eased off, as well.

Real estate agents are less enthusiastic than they should be, since volume is only off by about three sales from the monthly average for April, and trhree-quarters of the 16 sales were over the $1 million mark, similar to statistics for March. In fact, once the high and low prices and markups are removed from the monthly totals, the remaining sales averaged exactly the same 22.1-percent markup in both March and April. Lowest price in April was $745,000, but the average for the four under-$1 million sales was $865,000, still very high in historical terms.

And while three of the sales were for houses which had been on the market for over a year, six of the reported sales were arranged in 10 days or less, an indication that if houses are properly priced, they will sell right away. In other words, there are plenty of buyers out there, but they’re becoming very price-conscious, and with some uncertainty in the market they are not willing to risk overpaying for such a big investment. And for some reason this has been a late-blooming spring market, and many owners are only now choosing to list their houses.

The condominium market, on the other hand, is bursting. After six sales in the first three months averaging 26 percent above valuation, there were five more in April alone, with an average markup of 32 percent. Only one of the sales was over $1 million and another apartment sold for only $369,000, but the others were fairly close to the average $751,025.

April saw four house sales in the Circle Road area and one more on Roslyn Avenue north of the city limits, two in eastern Notre Dame de Grâce and one on Cedar Avenue just east of Westmount. Prices are down about 10 percent, year-over-year in the latter two districts, about even in the northern area of adjacent-Westmount where volume has doubled compared to last year, while it is only half what it was last year to the east and west of the city limits.

Posted by andy April 2013

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