with few new listings, supply is listing
April marked the third straight month of increasing home sales counts in the Vancouver Region, with buyers keeping up the pressure on supply. Indeed, continued demand combined with new listings lethargy means a material inventory expansion will likely be elusive in the months ahead.
up 3.2%, townhomes 1.9%, and condos 1.9% versus April).
Ultimately, our market has a new listings problem: through the first four months of 2023, there have only been 23,386 new listings in the Vancouver Region. While this may sound like a big number, it happens to be the second-fewest number of new listings on a year-to-date basis since 2005 (with only the first four months of 2020 tallying fewer). The early returns for sales, new listings, and inventory in May suggest the market momentum established early this year will continue, despite the persistence of high interest rates. Indeed, without an influx of new housing supply onto our market, buyers will continue to face strong competition for available homes, in turn yielding more upward price pressure in the months ahead.
After failing to reach the 3,000-sales threshold for 8 consecutive months, a spark has apparently been lit under the demand side of the housing market in the Vancouver Region, with April bearing witness to 4,216 MLS sales. This marked the second straight month of more than 4,000 sales following March’s strong showing. Notably, April’s sales count was actually 5% above March’s, whereas the typical March- to-April pattern is a 7% drop in sales counts. April was, however, still down 12% versus April 2022 and was 15% below the past 10- year April average. So while sales counts are growing, they remain below what is typical for this market at this time of year. Inventory, meanwhile, just can’t get going, with there being only 11,988 listings available at the end of April. While this was 2% more than at the previous month’s
end, it expanded by far less than the more typical 8%. As a result, the number of homes available for purchase sits 29% below its long-run average.
With the pace of sales once again increasing—complemented, as our
monthly advisor survey has revealed, by an increasing prevalence of multiple-offer and subject-free offer scenarios— and inventory only inching upward, market conditions tilted further in favour of sellers in April. Specifically, the months-of-inventory (MOI) measure for the Vancouver Region declined to 2.8 in April (from 2.9 in March)—a reflection of a deeply-entrenched sellers’ market (NB: a sellers’ market is indicated by 5.0 or less MOI). The imbalance between supply and demand has continued to put upward pressure on prices, with benchmark prices increasing again in April by an average of 2.5% (detached home prices were
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