BC Northern Real Estate Board

The number of homes sold through the MLS® System of the BC Northern Real Estate Board totaled 273 units in May 2020. This was a decline of 36.5% from May 2019, much smaller than the 57% year-over-year drop recorded in April.

On a year-to-date basis, home sales totalled 1,075 units over the first five months of the year, down 29.9% from the same period in 2019.

“Home sales and new listings both bounced back significantly in May after falling sharply in April,” said Shawna Kinsley, President of the BC Northern Real Estate Board. “Obviously things are not back to normal yet, but both demand and supply appear to have recovered more than half of their losses in the space of one month, and the underlying trend continues to show improvement.”

The average price of homes sold in May 2020 was $326,578, rising 4.1% from May 2019.

The more comprehensive year-to-date average price was $308,025, edging up 1.6% from the first five months of 2019.

The Board cautions that the average residential price is a useful figure only for establishing trends and comparisons over a period of time. It does not indicate an actual price for a home due to the wide selection of housing available over a vast geographic area (the Board serves an area covering over 600,000 square kilometers or 72% of the province).

The dollar value of all home sales in May 2020 was $89.2 million, falling 33.9% from the same month in 2019.

There were 576 new residential listings in May 2020. This was a large 33.6% decline on a year-over-year basis, but again, much smaller than the April decline.

Active residential listings numbered 1,977 units at the end of May. This was a decrease of 16.5% from the end of May 2019 and was one of just two times in the last 25 years that there have been fewer than 2,000 listings on the market at this time of the year.

Months of inventory numbered 7.2 at the end of May 2020, up from the 5.5 months recorded at the end of May 2019 and above the long-run average of 6.2 months for this time of year. The number of months of inventory is the number of months it would take to sell current inventories at the current rate of sales activity.

Sales of all property types numbered 323 units in May 2020, a large decline of 36.8% from May 2019. The total value of all properties sold was $99.6 million, falling 34.3% from May 2019.