B.C. home sales slide almost 10 per cent in March despite mortgage rate drop
Home sales in British Columbia fell by almost 10 per cent in March compared with the same period last year, in a slowdown an analyst says could be buyers waiting for lower interest rates.
The B.C. Real Estate Association says the province saw 6,460 residential unit sales in the Multiple Listing Service systems last month, a 9.5-per-cent decline from March 2023.
The overall dollar volume of home sales also fell 3.6 per cent from the same month last year, dipping to $6.6 billion.
Association chief economist Brendon Ogmundson says in a statement that potential homebuyers “appear to be waiting on the Bank of Canada to lower its policy rate.”
Ogmundson says March's decline caps off a “slow start” to the first quarter of 2024 despite a “steep” drop in fixed mortgage rates.
The association says the average price of a home in B.C. on MLS did rise by 6.5 per cent from last March, reaching $1.02 million.
Overall, home sales in the province rose by 6.4 per cent in the first three months of this year, reaching almost 16,000 units.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 15, 2024.
CTVNews.ca Top Stories
Parents of infant who died in wrong-way crash on Ontario's Hwy. 401 were in same vehicle
Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit has released new details about a wrong-way collision in Whitby on Monday night that claimed the lives of four people.
Three Quebec men from same family father hundreds of children
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
B.C. mayor stripped of budget, barred from committees over Indigenous residential schools book
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
OPP's mandatory alcohol screening during traffic stops 'not acceptable': CCLA
A spike in impaired driving-related collisions has caused Ontario’s provincial police to begin enforcing mandatory alcohol screening (MAS) at all traffic stops in the Greater Toronto Area -- a move one civil rights group says is ‘not acceptable.’
Auston Matthews to miss second straight playoff game with Toronto Maple Leafs facing elimination
Auston Matthews will miss the Maple Leafs' must-win Game 6 against the Boston Bruins.
Jurors in Trump hush money trial hear recording of pivotal call on plan to buy affair story
Jurors in the hush money trial of Donald Trump heard a recording Thursday of him discussing with his then-lawyer and personal fixer a plan to purchase the silence of a Playboy model who has said she had an affair with the former president.
Southern Alberta store broken into by burly black bear
Staff at a small southern Alberta office supply store were shocked to find someone had broken into the business last week, but they were even more confused when they discovered the culprit was a bear.
Captain sentenced to 4 years for criminal negligence in fiery deaths of 34 aboard scuba boat
A federal judge on Thursday sentenced a scuba dive boat captain to four years in custody and three years supervised release for criminal negligence after 34 people died in a fire aboard the vessel.
New scam targets Canada Carbon Rebate recipients
Fake text message and email campaigns trying to get money and information out of unsuspecting Canadian taxpayers have started circulating, just months after the federal government rebranded the carbon tax rebate the Canada Carbon Rebate.