Local real estate agents set a record for the month of December, as 80 units changed hands.
That number represented a leap from last year’s sales for the same month by 33 per cent.
For 2018, home sales totalled 1,289 units, down nearly five per cent from 2017, but still one of the better years on record, according to officials with the Chatham-Kent Association of Realtors.
“With the market still starved for supply, even a big jump in new supply is likely to get scooped up quickly, and that’s exactly what appears to have happened in December with a big increase in new listings coinciding with a record December for sales,” Steve Carroll, president of the Chatham-Kent Association of Realtors, said in a media release. “It is only one month of data, but if the increase in new supply were to be sustained it would eventually start to take some of the pressure off prices.”
The average price of homes sold in December 2018 was $214,094, surging 31.4 per cent from December 2017.
Overall, the annual average price was $214,078 in 2018, up 17.7 percent from 2017.
There were 95 new residential listings in December 2018, a large increase of nearly 164 per cent on a year-over-year basis.
Active residential listings numbered 195 units at the end of 2018, up one listing from the end of 2017, but below the end of every other year on record.
Months of inventory numbered 2.4 at the end of 2018, down from the 3.2 months recorded at the end of 2017 and a record low for the end of the year. The number of months of inventory is the number of months it would take to sell current inventories at the current rate of sales activity.
