‘It was out of control’: Some Okanagan residents relieved by housing market downturn | Globalnews.ca

House prices are slowly starting to decline in the Okanagan, although they are still much higher than they were a year ago.

In the June report from the Association of Realtors, the price tag for a single-family home is listed at $1,112,400. It’s a 15 percent increase from the same period last year, but compared to the previous month, it looks a bit less robust.

In May, the benchmark price for a home in the Central Okanagan was $1,130,400, 1.6 percent higher than in June.

Price changes were similar throughout the valley. In the North Okanagan, the reference price in June was $798,500, up 13.8% from last year and down from $807,600 in May.

The South Okanagan saw its benchmark price for a single-family home rise 18.4 percent from the same period last year, reaching $816,300.

That’s down from $826,200 the previous month.

However, the metric that experiences the biggest change is the number of sales. In the Central Okanagan, there were 27.5 percent fewer sales in June this year compared to last year. In the northern Okanagan, sales were down 20.2 percent in that time period and there was a 22.8 percent drop in the southern Okanagan.

Experts say the changing housing landscape was caused by the Bank of Canada raising interest rates, a move taken to curb inflation.

READ MORE: Okanagan housing market is stabilizing after rising interest rates

“It’s not unusual for mortgage rates to be affecting market activity, specifically in higher priced markets,” said Lyndi Cruickshank, president of the Interior Association of Realtors.

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“This is what usually happens when interest rates go up. It makes buying a home more expensive, which makes what a buyer can afford more limited. We are seeing this effect, particularly in what is typically a higher priced type of housing.”

West Kelowna resident Carmen Henderson is one of many who found herself navigating an intensely active real estate market just a few months earlier and can see both the positive and negative sides of change.

“We’re in a pretty unique position, where we sold high and bought high, so I don’t feel negative about the price change; we benefit,” Henderson said.

“Our real estate agent saw the change in the market coming and pushed us to put our house on the market quickly… only a few weeks later we would not have sold our house for the price we did.”

If things had dragged on, they also wouldn’t have qualified to buy their home at the asking price, he said.

Henderson says he has coworkers who were once ready to dive into the market, but today are still sitting on the sidelines of homeownership with persistently high home prices and falling purchasing power.

“It shocked what they could see and changed their purchasing power by between $100,000 and $200,000,” he said.

Ultimately, he said, simply slowing things down can’t be a bad thing.

“It was out of control,” Henderson said. “The house we bought had four offers in one day…and our house was sold in 48 hours. A calmer stable market is a good thing.”

The real estate association said there was a 14.2 percent increase in listings within the region with 3,265 new listings registered compared to the same period last year, up 3.1 percent on 3,166. of last month.

Overall active listings also saw a healthy rebound with 7,154 listings currently on the market, an increase of 45.1 percent in year-over-year comparisons.