Hamilton housing market continues to sizzle despite listings reaching decade-lows

Home sales in Hamilton and Burlington remain red-hot despite demand far outpacing supply.

The Realtors Association of Hamilton-Burlington (RAHB) reported 1,607 residential sales in June - a year-to-year increase of nearly 10 per cent and about 14 per cent above the month's five-year average.

It's one of the strongest outputs on record for the month of June, but it also points to a concerning trend, said Danna Bacher, president of the RAHB.

While the current market looks sizzling relative to last summer - home sales in the first six months of 2021 are up 57 per cent annually - it's been shielded behind decade-lows of supply.

We have unprecedented demand, but not enough houses on the market to keep up with it," said Bacher in an interview.

The 1,219 active residential listings in June marked a 33 per cent decrease from the same period last year, according to a RAHB report released Monday.

That's less than half of the more than 3,000 active listings reported in June 2018 and the lowest in the past three decades.

Bacher said the supply issue began to surface in the fall of 2019 and was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. That's when the market was sent into a frenzy, she said, because there were more buyers than there were homes for sale.

Our shelves were already bare before this," she said. We started the pandemic with one roll of toilet paper on the shelf, and we've just been stocking that shelf repeatedly."

It's led to bidding wars and an overheated market. Bacher said the sharp drop in active listings has also had a psychological effect on buyers: no one wants to miss out.

If you saw 50 for-sale signs in a neighbourhood, you don't have that fear of missing out or that frantic bidding," she said. But there should always be a sustainable number of homes on the market. We need to find a way to get listings up."

As listings persistently decrease, home prices continue to soar.

The average home in Hamilton and Burlington sold for $865,339 in June, up 27 per cent from June 2020.

Together, all home sales combined for $1.4 billion - a record for the month of June.

Sebastian Bron is a Hamilton-based reporter at The Spectator. Reach him via email: sbron@thespec.com