I’ll start off by saying that I am not breaking any news by stating that the market has slowed significantly in recent days. We can blame interest rates, but the reality is that this same slowdown happens every December, and January. The combination of the holidays and the start of winter weather means people are choosing to relax, enjoy the season, and maybe do a little hibernating. However,...
The past two years have not been an easy time for anyone who’s been looking to get into the housing market. When prices haven’t been at dizzying, record-setting heights as they were in 2021 and early 2022, the highest interest rates in 15 years have stepped right in to compensate for falling prices – making the dream of home ownership just as difficult to realize for prospective first time...
The past several weeks haven’t exactly been jam packed with good news on the economic front. Canadian consumers are aware by now of the pain that’s being inflicted both by the widespread economic malady of the day (inflation), as well as its hardly-more-attractive remedy (interest rate hikes). While the Bank of Canada’s efforts to curb runaway price increases since the beginning of 2022 have met...
The rapidly changing skyline of Waterloo Region is a theme I’ve visited many times before. The condo building boom of the previous several years has been one of the most outwardly obvious signs of our area’s growing demographics and economy, and of our local governments’ focus on intensifying urbanization rather than expanding outwards. It might surprise you (or perhaps not!) to learn that...
With the summertime winding down and the kids beginning to make their return to the classroom, we in the real estate business are getting ready for the perennial increase in market activity, as families are back in town and people’s minds turn back to more business-oriented affairs. And as the pace of the Waterloo Region market pics up into September, we’ve also been given some new information just...
The end of the summer vacation season tends to be a hectic time for most people, but it’s always been doubly so for residents of Waterloo – for visiting students and year-rounders alike. With three major post-secondary institutions to be found within five minutes of the centre of town, late August and early September each year bring a surge of population back to what’s always been a relatively...
Waterloo Region as we know it today started out from the humblest of beginnings – a smattering of farming communities spread out across the central portion of the Grand River watershed in the early 1800s. From there, we’ve grown to a total of over 625,000 residents, concentrated overwhelmingly in the major population centres of Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge. And, just as the Region...
Housing prices are coming down – so why are we seeing fewer showings? It’s a fair question. You’d think that after two years’ worth of price increase after price increase, weary and frustrated buyers would now be coming out in droves to take advantage of a cooling market. But while the buyer pool hasn’t necessarily disappeared altogether, the numbers do point (both statistically and...
We all know that nothing lasts forever; a ‘true-ism’ that applies within every realm of our material world. For many months it was the turn of homeowners to watch their property values climb up and up and up, and to cash in on record-breaking sale prices all over Southwestern Ontario. Meanwhile, for anyone else who found themselves on the purchasing side of a real estate transaction, the past two...
It’s a number that anyone who follows the real estate industry with any degree of regularity could see coming for months now, but somehow seeing it in print doesn’t make its realization any the less shocking: the average single detached home in Kitchener-Waterloo sold for nearly One Million Dollars ($997,654) in October. Some might try to write the million dollar mark off as more of a psychological...
