You hear it from the media and people talking on the streets—the real estate market is starting to heat up.
Multiple offer scenarios are no longer a thing of the past as while inventory is remaining on the low side, potential home buyers are now starting to get anxious and finally jumping off the fence to buy.
But will that drive sales prices to rise?
“We’re not looking for major record highs in 2014, but we’re also not going to see record lows,” said Lori-Ann Beausoleil, national leader for real estate for PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.
“We’re in a very balanced market right now where we have access to capital, equity, debt, opportunity to deploy that capital.”
Early this week I sat down with some friends of mine who have been passively looking to purchase their first home.
Their motivation in the past has been quite low as they were waiting for the market to bottom out.
As ideal buyers, husband Andy Mitchel, working in Alberta, and his lovely wife Tammy, an administrator for a local company here in Kelowna, have felt that there was simply no rush to buy, until now.
“We were always looking online to see what suitable properties were available for us, but never felt the urgency to get out there and seriously look,” said Tammy.
“It was only a couple weeks ago that a certain property caught our eye, we viewed it and decided to write an offer, but before we could, we found out there was already an accepted offer on the property and that another offer might already be coming in”
“It was really disappointing, it felt like we missed out on a great opportunity because we weren’t proactive as we should have been,” Andy added.
Sales of previously owned Canadian homes have been on the climb as last month sales for single family homes jumped 45 per cent from December 2012. It has been predicted that 2014 will be even stronger, according to a new projection from Canada’s largest real estate association.
Now appears to be the time for buyers to get out there and start actively looking for their ideal property and now is the time for sellers to get their home ‘show’ ready, so they can list their property on the market while inventory is on the lower end of the spectrum.
