Vancouver Housing Market is Heating Up - BMO Economics

After a prolonged slide in sales and prices, the Vancouver housing market has swung from "buyers" status to "balanced", according to a new report from BMO Economics on Canada's major housing markets.


The report titled "Canadian Housing Update: Tale of Four Cities" examines the state of the housing markets in Canada's four largest cities: Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal and Toronto.
"At the lowest point, sales were down 33 per cent year over year, but have since pole-vaulted 50 per cent to near-normal levels," said Sal Guatieri, Senior Economist, BMO Capital Markets. "Buyers held the upper hand last year, but the pendulum has swung toward balanced today. New home inventories, normalized for population growth, are only moderately above long-term norms."


Mr. Guatieri noted that last year's price drop of 6 per cent pales in comparison with the average 22 per cent correction that Vancouver has suffered on four other occasions since 1980. "The worst was a 35 per cent slide in the early 1980s, while the other three corrections clocked in at 22 per cent in the late 1990s, 17 per cent in the early 1990s and 15 per cent in 2008. Whatever you want to say about Vancouver's market, boring it's not."