Single Family Homes To The Moon In The Central Okanagan Posted In: Okanagan

July 4, 2021

As we dive into summer, June is not disappointing sellers of real estate. Whether you’re looking at the activity for Single Family Dwellings, Townhomes or Condos you are seeing a lot of action with regards to sales.  We have seen the “Covid-Purchase-Mania” effect slightly, I stress slightly, cool off, and have found ourselves shifting into a more seasonally acceptable range. A bit of reprieve for buyer agents? unlikely as inventory for all of the aforementioned types of products are at the lowest levels seen for the month of June when looking back all the way to 2015. 

When looking specifically at Single Family Dwelling (SFD) in the Central Okanagan we have seen tremendous growth (slightly over Double, yes double) in the average price when we compare averages observed back in January of 2015. Reader beware, averages can be deceiving as this statistic doesn’t imply that if you bought a house in 2015 for $500,000 it’s now worth $1,000,000.  What it does mean is everything is a heck of a lot more expensive, although I am sure there are some people out who have doubled up with some wise investments.

When comparing the SFD YTD June sales levels for 2015 to present on a year-to-year basis, we are currently in 1st place…barring any large deviations from typical seasonality (2020 not included) observed in years prior we should be in store for a banner year. When telling the story of 2021, one could say it started off with a bang in January through March and in April the SFD sales began to decrease and align with sales activity observed in 2016 (Boom Year). May saw a month over month decrease in sales (it fell in line with activity observed in 2017) while demand picked back up in June and now, we find ourselves sitting between levels observed in 2016 and 2017. 

SFD inventory is low. How low? Well, when looking at June, 489 homes were available for purchase in the Central Okanagan. With the 344 sales observed in June that roughly equates to 1.4 months of supply or an absorption rate of ~70%. To put this in perspective an absorption rate north of 20% is indicative of favoring sellers in a market. In conclusion, with the SFD sales and inventory at their current levels, buyers of real estate may not be getting the “right” home but the “Right now” home, please excuse the cliché.  If you prefer visuals in the form of graphs, please check out our June 2021 Free Central Okanagan Report. All statistics for this post are derived from The Association of Interior Realtors (AOIR) monthly housing statistics. Our views do not reflect the views of AOIR and we appreciate the effort they put forth to provide monthly statistics to the public.