The thought of statistics might make you shudder, but you probably crunch numbers more than you realize. It’s a pretty good feeling when a rookie on your favourite baseball team starts batting over .300, or you finish your recreational hockey game at a +2.
For Jason Wheeldon at Royal LePage East Kootenay Realty sports stats are pretty good, but housing stats are better. Wheeldon started selling real estate in Cranbrook in 1994, and began compiling statistics immediately. Now he has over two decades of data you can’t find anywhere else —there’s no public body that publishes over 20 years of statistics for the local market.
Wheeldon’s combination of stats and experience give him an excellent sense of market trends. So even when something as unpredictable as a global pandemic hits, Wheeldon can read the numbers and help his clients make sense of it all.
“People love to oversimplify and say the market is booming, but the numbers give us more detail,” he says. “There was a significant drop in April and May, but we’ve seen a healthy recovery since then.”
Wheeldon runs the numbers
Wheeldon focuses on single family dwellings within Cranbrook city limits when looking for market trends. Here’s what he’s seeing in 2020:
- Are people buying houses? Demand has stayed relatively consistent, Wheeldon says. When you compare January to October 2019 to the same months in 2020, we are approximately four per cent higher in unit volume this year.
- Are there enough houses for sale? Supply dropped significantly when the economy ground to a halt in April and May, but Wheeldon is seeing a slow recovery. “Inventory is still down. We’re 22 per cent lower in inventory compared to last year,” Wheeldon says. So if you’re considering putting your home on the market now is a great time. There will be little competition.
- Are house prices higher? “The average house price is up 7.4 per cent in 2020, with the current average home price sitting at $380,090,” Wheeldon says, so yes, house prices are climbing.
- Is this a housing bubble? Is it going to burst? With 27 years of experience, Wheeldon says we should expect a market correction eventually. “Locally, we can expect a market correction when Cranbrook exceeds a four to five month supply. Right now we have about a two month supply.”
- What is ‘a month’s supply’ of homes? 38 homes were sold in Cranbrook in September. With only 74 active listings on the market right now, that’s about a two month supply of homes. A five month supply in Cranbrook is about 130 listings.
The Jason Wheeldon PREC team includes Wheeldon, licensed REALTOR assistant Kaytee Wheaton, and office administrator Laura Kennedy. For more information on the Cranbrook housing market visit cranbrookrealty.com or follow Jason Wheeldon Personal Real Estate Corp. on Facebook.