Home sales in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) climbed significantly in July in a divergence from the latest numbers in Vancouver.
Residential home sales were up by 18.6% in the GTA for the month compared with last July, the Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB) reported on Friday.
The average selling price of the 6,961 homes that changed hands during the month rose by 4.8% on an annual basis to $782,129.
July’s climb follows a 2.4% increase in June sales compared with a year earlier after a steep sales drop of 22.2% in May.
“The positive results over the last two months are encouraging,” said TREB president Garry Bhaura.
The results from Toronto show a trend toward stabilization and a more balanced market, said Rishi Sondhi, an economist with Toronto-Dominion Bank: “It’s improving. It still has a ways to go to get back to the levels it was at before, but overall the market appears to be healthy.”
Results from Toronto are a contrast to Metro Vancouver, where the real estate board said Thursday that home sales tumbled to their lowest level in 18 years.
The Greater Vancouver Real Estate Board said 2,070 properties changed hands in July in a 30% plunge compared with the same month last year.
The divergence comes after the British Columbia government pushed forward with further measures to cool the housing market while Ontario has held off, said Sondhi: “The market’s still sort of contending with those measures as well, and that’s causing sort of a wedge, year to date.”
Toronto’s housing market is stabilizing following the shock from the federal government’s tighter mortgage rules that came into force in January, said Bank of Nova Scotia’s economics vice president Derek Holt.
“This fits our broad narrative that the second half of 2018 would begin to witness stronger housing figures as the transitory shock from tightened macroprudential rules ebbs,” he said in a note.
TREB also reported 13,868 new listings during the month, including 4,511 in Toronto alone, but the overall GTA figure was down by 1.8% year-over-year.
Toronto recorded 2,574 sales in July at an average price of $824,336, while in the rest of the GTA, the 4,387 properties sold last month fetched an average price of $757,365.
Detached homes sold in Toronto were the most expensive, with an average price of $1.35 million. The average detached home price in the rest of the GTA was $907,347.
TREB said that although the multiple listing service home price index composite benchmark during the month was down slightly compared with 2017, the annual growth rate “looks to be trending toward positive territory in the near future.”
The Ottawa Real Estate Board reported on Friday that sales in the city were up 5.9% for July compared with last year with 1,614 homes sold, above the five-year average of 1,501 sales for July.