Photo: Contributed
The real estate market in the Okanagan may finally be levelling out.
Residential home sales in the Okanagan were higher in January than they were in 2015 and the overall number of houses on the market is down significantly, says the Okanagan Mainline Real Estate Board.
The board’s numbers show that overall sales in January were 5.6 per cent higher than a year ago, at 353, but that sales in December were down 22 per cent, to 453.
Those numbers cover the area from Revelstoke to Peachland.
Anthony Bastiaanssen, OMREB’s president, says dropping sales point to the fact that “we’re moving to a little more normalized market,” which is good news for potential buyers.
Right now, the scant selection on the market means prices are very high and lots of people are holding off buying a home.
“There are buyers out there but they’re waiting on the sidelines from something to come up,” Bastiaanssen says.
Meanwhile, the “insane” Vancouver housing market has prompted people who were planning on selling and retiring to the Okanagan to move up their timelines as they look at opportunity to see high right now.
That has translated into a surge in people from the lower mainland and Vancouver Island buying property in the Okanagan.
According to Bastiaanssen, buyers from the coast outnumbered buyers coming from Alberta this year, reversing a several-year trend that saw more people moving to the Okanagan from the east than the west.
However, December saw Alberta buyers once again squeak ahead of coastal ones, a trend Bastiaanssen, said could have something to do with the 15 per cent real estate tax the provincial government created last year to target foreign buyers.
The tax was widely panned by the real estate industry, but Bastiaanssen said new modifications to it are “very welcome news, and should have been done from the beginning.”
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