Oak Bay 2021 Recap – Victoria Real Estate Update
The summer of 2020 was really the beginning of what has been an incredible run in real estate in Victoria with low rates fuelling demand. June 2020 really marked the return of our ‘spring market’ with the first month that we’ve ever recorded an average sale price in single family homes above $1,000,000. Aside from a few outlier months the market has been gaining momentum since that time. At the end of December 2020 we hit a 25-year all-time low in active listings (1267) that then peaked in the spring but has been declining since.
That decline in inventory from the spring earlier this year has gotten more and more dire as we’ve reached December 2021 with less than 800 active listings in Greater Victoria. Because of the squeeze on inventory, the current demand we’re experiencing is putting a tremendous amount of pressure on prices. The other factor is buyers trying to get into the market before the current lending environment begins the shift (which the Bank of Canada is signaling). As a consequence, competition has intensified as we’ve headed towards the winter.
The average sale price of a detached home in Oak Bay in 2020 was $1,707,764. In 2021 it’s $1,957,763. For homes built prior to 1960 this shifts to $1,503,643 for 2020 and $1,769,513. Both of these numbers are skewed to a degree because the luxury market is also on fire. It looks as though we’ll end up with about the same amount of sales for 2021 as we did in 2020 (282) but low inventory and heightened consumer confidence have been the major catalysts to drive pricing this year. Expect the same seller’s market to persist as long as rates and inventory to remain historically low.
