Strong home sales in April across Metro Vancouver have kept prices relatively flat but pushed the region closer to being in a sellers' market than at any time since mid-2011.
That is because the number of new listings could not keep up with the strong sales, according to data that the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver (REBGV) released May 2.
The benchmark home price across the region rose to $619,000 in April. That is 0.6% more than in March and 3.6% more than in April 2013.
The region's 3,050 sales in April, however, were 15.5% more than in the longer month of March and 16.1% more than in April 2013.
New listings could not keep up with those sales, rising 12.7% compared with March and only 1.3% compared with April 2013.
That meant that the sales-to-active-listings ratio was pushed to 19.7%, or the highest that indicator has been since June 2011.
"We're not in a sellers' market," REBGV president Ray Harris said. "For that to happen we would have a higher price-to-active-listings ratio for a sustained amount of time."
Conventional real estate wisdom is that a market is considered to be a buyers' market when the sales-to-active-listings ratio is below 13%. A balanced market exists when the ratio is between 13% and about 21%, Harris explained. It is then considered a sellers' market when the ratio is above 21% for at least a few months, he added.
The result of stronger sales than new listings is that Metro Vancouver's current sales-to-active-listings ratio rose 1.5 percentage points to its current 19.7%.
That index was stuck at 18.2% for the past two months and was at 15.7% a year ago. To get a sense of how much of an upward trajectory the trend-line has been for the sales-to-active-listings ratio, the indicator was as low as 8% in September 2012.
