We hope that everyone is staying healthy and safe during this unprecedented time! We’ve summarized what’s happening in our real estate market for April in a short video. For those of you who’d prefer to read the blog, the video has been transcribed below!
“Hi Everyone, Rich Fournier from the Fournier Real Estate Team at Remax Hallmark Chay out of Barrie Ontario and I wanted to send you a quick update on the Real Estate Market in Barrie and Simcoe County which includes areas like Essa, Innisfil, Springwater, Oro-Medonte to name just a few….
To be honest this is an extraordinary time in the world. Never in the history of the world have we literally closed down over 50% of the world economy.
Needless to say I have had a tonne of questions into the state of the real estate market up here so I thought that I would share with you some numbers.
January through March of this year was on track to be a record year when we looked at the number of sales (transactions) that were happening.The boards recently posted the March numbers and they were very strong. In our email last week we sent you some of those statistics.
BUT what I find more interesting is what is currently happening in April. This is really the first full month of our economic lockdown and I think that these numbers are very important.
So let’s start from the beginning. The demand was off the charts at the beginning of the year and keep in mind that the mortgage stress test was and is still in place and the foreign buyers tax was and is still in place. Nothing had really changed except that people had saved up more money for their downpayments. We had extremely low inventory and high demand which ment that we had multiple offers again from October 2019 all the way through March of this year.
Even with the current situation we are still selling real estate, transactions are still happening in spite of the lockdown. Yes volumes are down significantly but we are seeing virtual deals happening throughout the area.
In the last seven days on the Barrie Real Estate Board we have had 117 new listings hit the market, 57 conditional sales, 53 properties have sold firm, 81 properties have closed.
My expectation is that in the next 60 days we will see a loosening of the restrictions. Demand into Simcoe County is going to be through the roof as people start to rethink living in big city centres and living in condo buildings. Demand for detached properties will go through the roof One thing that this lockdown has proven is that more people can work from home because of video and technology which will create more demand into places like Simcoe County and into the countryside.
Don’t get me wrong this is a very challenging situation and yes there are a lot of people who are losing their jobs which will make it near impossible to qualify for a mortgage until they gain some job stability. Having said that, inventory is still very low and the demand will definitely outpace the available inventory that we have here in Simcoe County. If you want to get into the granular details of the numbers please reach out to me personally as every persons financial situation is different. “
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Please take care and stay safe!