The daily question for a Realtor® again has to be answered with qualifications and take into consideration that when you are dealing with small sample of data one or two anomalies can through all the ratios out the window. The attached stats are for residential sales only for this period of time. What does it tell us? In general, it’s telling us the market is looking pretty good. We have had 25 sales to date in 2015 and compared to 15 and 17 respectively for the last 2 years for the same period. Of course, as any Realtor® will tell you, we can go for a period with no sales and the averages will come into line with the previous years but in this industry you have to have a positive outlook every day and try to keep the momentum going. In general it is looking pretty good so far. A word of caution though, it’s not time to start raising prices. Since a very large percentage of our buyers come from “Away”, they perceive Salt Spring to be a rural island and are surprised by th…

The Real Estate year of 2014 finished decidedly on a higher note. For the first time since the price peaking years of 2007/8, the number of sales exceeded 200, representing a 17% increase from the last 5 year average of 183 sales per year. A total of 214 properties exchanged hands on the island in 2014 with the total volume of $111,039,622. All numbers in all sectors were moderately up. The average price of a non-waterfront SFD is now $507,159 ($249,839 in 2000 and $623,492 in 2008). In the oceanfront property sector the average sale price is $982k (the average sale price in 2008 was $1,875,333 and $554,049 in 2000). 6 non-waterfront homes sold over $1 mil but only 9 in the waterfront sector (interestingly enough, the most sales of waterfronts over $1 mil occurred in 2012, 14 in total). In 2014, there were 16 Townhomes sales, 11 homes in Brinkworthy and 22 sales of vacant land. The highest sale was a waterfront property on Bold Bluff – sold for $3.545 mil (ov…

One of the things about being a Realtor is that the common greeting I receive is “ Hi John, how’s the market?”. It has been said that Canadians are obsessed with the weather and watch the weather reports like the stock market. They also seem to be obsessed with the real estate market in the same way. In fact you can take any 6 o'clock news channel weather report and exchange the temperatures and rain or snow predictions for property types and prices and it would fit seamlessly. They want to know what the temperatures were today, what are they now and what will they be tomorrow and what is the trend in the near future. Standing in front of a map of BC the Realtor reporter can point to areas with a big capital “ H” and explain that there has been a High pressure front in Campbell River and the market volume has risen by almost 46% in 2014 which will move on down the island in the next month or so. The “ L” area around Kamloops is was a cooling trend but it is a weak front an…