Bidding Wars Break Out As House Prices Continue To Climb In Halifax
HALIFAX — House prices in Halifax have soared in the last few months, sparking bidding wars amongst home buyers and leading some to compare the city’s housing market to places like Toronto and Vancouver.
Last month, the average home in Halifax sold for $359,958, a nearly 10 percent spike from June 2019. Across the province, home sales broke records as buyers dished out a total of $408.7-million to buy new houses in June.
Supply and demand issues had been driving prices up in Halifax before Covid-19 arrived, but the pandemic has only accelerated the trend.
When Covid-19 first walloped the city’s economy, homeowners got spooked and stopped putting their houses on the market. In April, there were 60 percent fewer homes for sale than in April 2019.
There were fewer people buying houses as well, obviously, but the number of houses sold only dropped by 50 percent.
With more people trying to buy homes than sell them, the supply-and-demand crunch caused average home prices in the city to jump by four percent, to $330,565, in the middle of a record-setting recession.
In June, the recession began to ease but house prices only went higher.
Matt Honsberger is the sitting past president of the Nova Scotia Association of Realtors (NSAR). He says the same supply-and-demand issues driving up prices in April remain at the centre of ballooning home prices today. Only now, they’re worse.
“There was clearly pent-up demand [in the market],” he says. “And as soon as [Covid-19] restrictions started to lift a little bit all those folks who weren’t in the ‘I have to move,’ but the ‘I want to move’ scenario started to come back out.”
When that happened, there were so few houses on the market that the competition was fierce.
According to the NSAR, the number of houses for sale last month was lower than it had been in more than 15 years, with only 4,398 active listings in the province (a drop of 35 percent compared to last year).
On top of that, Honsberger says buyers have come back more quickly than sellers, so any new house that does go up for sale gets snapped up immediately.
That has meant a hyper-competitive buying market that has seen bidding wars break out across the HRM.
Not long ago, Honsberger says he saw 23 offers come in on a single listing.
“I’ve never seen anything like that in Atlantic Canada,” Honsberger, whose been a realtor in the region for close to two decades, said. “This is a Toronto, Vancouver type of market. I’ve never seen it quite this imbalanced.”
Downtown Halifax and Dartmouth area are the main bidding war hotspots, but Honsberger says more far-flung neighbourhoods aren’t immune.
“Given the state of the market, if a nice listing comes on, even if it’s fairly suburban, you can still have seven to 10 offers on it sometimes,” he says.
The CMHC has predicted house prices in Canada will start to creep back down later this year. Honsberger says that, in Halifax, a lot of what happens with housing will be tied to job growth and in-migration.
If people get back to work quickly, and the borders reopen soon, he thinks the lots of people will still want to buy houses and the market will stay strong.
“We might see a bit of a balancing, where houses go onto the market, they sell in a reasonable time, and there are not 10 offers on them, but I still think it’s going to be a pretty good market,” he says.