Weekly Wrap Up...It was an Interesting Last 7 Days!

It was an interesting last 7 days we’ve had! COVID numbers continue to climb in Ontario (to a smaller extent in Sudbury as well); which has led to Ford requesting immediate family only around the Thanksgiving table this year. I have a feeling there may be an abundance of XL Turkeys at the grocery stores this year.

On a local note, we saw the Judge in the Renee Sweeney case move forward with Sudbury as the location; ruling that he didn’t think the media has prejudiced the jury pool that will ultimately be selected. And some good news for the local gamblers, the Gateway Casino will be opening back up as of Saturday; interesting that the government is ok with me playing slots with 49 other people but I can’t have my parents over at my house for Thanksgiving dinner.

From a real estate perspective, we continue the trend of more listings than sales that we’ve seen in the last few weeks (good news for buyers)! Week-to-week activity is staying pretty consistent with conditional deals being exactly average for the week as well. 

My 5 takeaways this week are:

• New listings continue to surpass the weekly sales! This is adding more product to the market and should be putting less stress on buyers. The interesting thing is that a lot of buyers are feeling that they may be running out of time to purchase something before the winter is here. This is pushing them to buy now before they are forced to move in a snow storm.
• The frustration of listing agents not pricing places correctly was back this week, not with the volume that we have seen in past weeks. The most interesting example of it this week was a big New Sudbury home that felt like a rustic log home complete from Manitoulin Island. It was a large place with an in-ground pool in the backyard to complete the package. This place was listed under 400k and sold for a whopping 115k over list price!
• Market activity continues at a constant pace. When watching the trends of conditional deals every week, we see that the number of transactions has stayed very consistent with our weekly snapshot showing 22 pending deals for multiple weeks in a row. We did see these top out at the high 20’s (even reaching 33 deals one week back in July), but the pre-winter market continues to be chugging along at a standard pace.
• This week we saw an interesting example where they held off offers on a property in Lively. There was a bit of a fixer-upper property price just above 300k in a good area of Mikkola, and I actually thought it was underpriced slightly. They were holding off offers for a few days and ultimately didn’t even get their full price. The interesting part is that there was a similar house that was listed at the same time with an offer date a few days later that is on the other side of the highway (upper lively) but more updated; I believe that a lot of the same buyers would be looking at both of these properties. I think what happened is most buyers are leaning towards the more renovated home and because that offer date hasn’t happened yet, they passed up the better location place (that needed more work) with the thought of entering a bidding war on the other property. This is an interesting example of holding off offers. You have to be aware of your competition and when offers are due. I honestly believe that if the Mikkola property would have had an offer date after the more renovated house; they would have had more interest from the people who missed out on the Upper Lively home.
• Looking at the numbers this week, it really feels like the slowdown is coming. It is funny these listings are coming up now with only a few months until our winter market is here and some of the buyers icing their home search until the spring thaw. This combined with the mortgage deferrals ending for the 20% of Canadians who opted to put their mortgages on hold; there are lots of factors that could point to the shift in listings continuing.

This may feel like the most interesting thanksgiving weekend that I can remember. Going back to only being surrounded by our immediate family bubble, and any others being present over zoom. I saw someone comment on Facebook that the steps we take now at Thanksgiving will go a long way to enabling us to gather together at Christmas!