House prices down for fifth straight month: Teranet Index
By Erica Alini - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - 0 Comments
House prices dipped 0.3 per cent in January from December, the fifth straight month of declines, according to the National Bank’s Teranet House Price Index, which tracks repeat sales of single-family homes in 11 Canadian cities. Compared to January of last year, prices were up 2.7 per cent, the smallest yearly increase since November 2009 and the 14th straight month of decelerating year-over-year gains.
Monthly house prices dropped in seven cities, but all urban centres except Vancouver registered gains on a year-over-year basis.
In B.C.’s largest city, prices edged down 0.8 per cent in January from a month earlier and were down a more noticeable 2.5 per cent from January 2012.
In Calgary prices were virtually unchanged (-0.1 per cent) last month from December and up 4.3 per cent from a year ago.
In Toronto prices dipped 0.4 per cent on a monthly basis, but were up a robust 5.3 per cent on a yearly basis.
In Montreal price movements tracked the national average, dipping 0.2 per cent from December and gaining 2.6 per cent from January 2012.
The strongest performance came from Atlantic Canada: prices in Halifax were up 1.7 per cent from a month earlier and 6.6 per cent from year-ago levels.
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The shocking truth about the value of your home
By Duncan Hood - Monday, February 23, 2009 at 6:50 PM - 1,401 Comments
New evidence shows that Canadian prices could go down, and stay down, for a decade
There are still people out there who don’t believe Canada is about to be hit by a devastating housing crisis, but Riaz Kassam isn’t one of them. For him, the crisis has already arrived.
Last July, he made an $80,000 pre-sale payment on a $1.5-million penthouse condominium in Vancouver’s tony H&H Yaletown building, just a few blocks away from where he lives. Kassam, a 42-year-old computer analyst, who’s married with no kids, expected to move in by the end of 2008. But when he put his current apartment on the market, he didn’t get a single offer. He thought maybe he had priced it a little high, so he knocked a bit off. Still, no offers. He lowered it again, and again, until eventually he was offering his apartment for a full $120,000 less than his initial asking price. That’s when he realized he was in trouble. “We reached the point where we couldn’t drop the price any more,” he says, “or we wouldn’t have enough for the down payment on the new property.”
