■ Real estate hasn’t cooled — yet,
Toronto prices, sales rise despite pandemic, but experts foresee slowdown
After 27 years, Mike and Andrée Sullivan expect to list their four-bedroom century home in Weston on Thursday — just as they had planned to before a pandemic rolled right into the real estate’s sector’s busy spring season.
It’s a bold move, but not a crazy one. To many people’s surprise, Toronto’s real estate market is showing few signs of slowing down, despite the mounting crisis.
In fact, house prices are continuing to trend up — 14.5 per cent year over year so far this month, according to John Pasalis, the statistic-tracking president of the Realosophy brokerage in Leslieville.
The number of sales also rose last week — 18 per cent year over year — although that’s down from the 55 per cent of the previous week.
New listings also continued to grow after last week’s COVID shutdown, albeit by only three per cent year over year compared with 50 per cent the week before.
The numbers are only a snapshot — a picture of where we are, not necessarily where the market is heading, Pasalis warned.
March Break was in the third week of March this year, rather than the second week of the month as it was last year. That could account for some of the lower sales and listings numbers last week. Usually, the weeks before and after the spring break are busier than the week itself.
People are definitely trying to list their homes as soon as possible, Pasalis said.
Nobody who plans to sell wants to delay.
But he doesn’t think the spike in sales and listings the second week of March was related to the pandemic and although some people may have expedited their listings prior to March Break, Pasalis says it likely wasn’t the majority.
Right At Home Realty president John Lusink says he is as surprised as anyone to see that listings in his company were up two per cent last week compared with the previous preshutdown week.
Listings are down six per cent year over year in March, however, in Right At Home’s Toronto, Barrie and Ottawa territories.
Sales that have yet to close were also up nine per cent last week over the previous week.
Still, despite the market’s resilience, many in the real estate industry do expect activity to slow going forward.
“Given what’s happened this past week with both (real estate) associations and companies now prohibiting open houses, you’re going to see a further impact. Most people are making do. At some point, if you can’t actually get in, that will certainly put a damper on sales figures,” Lusink said.
“Anecdotally, agents have been sharing with us that they are advising clients to hold of putting their properties on the market unless they absolutely have to,” he added.
Donal McCarthy of Keller Williams Referred Urban Realty says he has been watching Toronto Regional Real Estate Board statistics inside the City of Toronto’s borders.
Although there has been a drop in sales since March 13, “it’s not as reduced as some folks are thinking,” he said.
“The number of listings had been increasing. We’ll see next week where that’s at,” McCarthy said. “The market is still churning.”
For home seller Mike Sullivan, 67, listing his house was a bit like ripping off a bandage. He wants to get on with the tough decision of leaving the community where the former MP has deep roots.
The stairs are painful for his arthritic knee and the growing gentrification of his beloved neighbourhood is increasingly tough to watch, he said.
Sullivan admits the couple is nervous about selling during the COVID-19 outbreak. They are isolating as much as possible. “When COVID arrived, I started to get anxious, but we couldn’t get ready in time,” he said.
Their realtor, Luisa Bada of Spectrum Realty Services, says sellers are hesitant to list because of the risk of COVID-19 exposure during showings and few will want to buy a house without seeing it first.
But with 360-degree virtual tours and videos, it is still possible to buy and sell. She can also arrange video conferencing so that buyers can take a virtual walk-through of a property.
A big change to the way Bada operates, she said, is that she is now insisting on calls with buyers’ agents if someone wants to see a house in person.
“I want to know more about the seriousness of their buyer and whether or not this is within their reach. If they are just going to a home to see it, forget it,” she said.
Buyers who come to the house will be given gloves and hand sanitizer before Bada escorts them through.
“We’ll try to do the no-touch thing as best we can — leave closet doors open, leave lights on so people don’t have to touch so much when they’re in the house,” she said.
Bada predicts the market will slow. She is already seeing fewer active buyers.
“Whether (properties) hold or they drop in price … a lot of that will be determined by a recession if it happens and how profound that might be,” she said.
Sullivan says he and Andrée are anxious to move closer to family in either Paris, Ont., or Qualicum Beach, B.C., hopefully in the summer.
They are carrying on with listing their four-bedroom, two bathroom home for $1.09 million, reasoning that another family will want to move before school starts next fall.
But, said Sullivan, “We are not going to sell for less than it’s worth. There is no panic.”