Always confusing when you are trying to describe how the increase of prices is slowing (sounds sort of like an oxymoron really), but for the 11th month in a row new house price increases are not as big as the previous month.
Contractors’ selling prices increased 7.7% in July compared with July 2006, a slightly slower rate than the 7.8% gain in June. Prices have been decelerating since August 2006 when the year-over-year rate of growth peaked at 12.1%.
That does not mean there are not hot spots in Canada, you have Edmonton where new housing prices are up over 38% year over year. Where I live housing prices are only up 1.4% year over year, which could be for a lot of reasons, my guess is a GLUT on the market as well (given if you find an open piece of ground developers send over a crew to start building on it in milliseconds where I live).
Is this cooling of prices a deflating bubble? Maybe, but remember prices are still going UP, and people are still buying houses, now, Interest Rates have not gone up as predicted either and that might be the cold water to slow the price index in this area to zero, but again, we shall see if and when that happens as well.
| New Housing Price Indexes | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| July 2007 | July 2006 to July 2007 | June to July 2007 | |
| 1997=100 | % change | ||
| Canada total | 154.5 | 7.7 | 0.9 |
| House only | 164.1 | 7.0 | 0.7 |
| Land only | 135.4 | 9.0 | 1.3 |
| St. John’s | 136.1 | 3.3 | 1.3 |
| Halifax | 139.6 | 6.8 | 0.1 |
| Charlottetown | 117.8 | 0.3 | 0.0 |
| Saint John, Fredericton and Moncton | 113.7 | 0.4 | 0.2 |
| Québec | 147.0 | 3.2 | 0.0 |
| Montréal | 153.6 | 3.9 | 0.0 |
| Ottawa–Gatineau | 161.7 | 1.4 | 0.1 |
| Toronto and Oshawa | 141.1 | 2.4 | 0.2 |
| Hamilton | 149.6 | 4.3 | 0.2 |
| St. Catharines–Niagara | 150.1 | 3.7 | 0.3 |
| Kitchener | 139.3 | 1.6 | 0.1 |
| London | 138.5 | 5.0 | 0.6 |
| Windsor | 102.3 | -3.5 | -0.6 |
| Greater Sudbury and Thunder Bay | 105.9 | 4.5 | -0.4 |
| Winnipeg | 168.1 | 15.7 | 4.3 |
| Regina | 191.7 | 23.0 | 1.6 |
| Saskatoon | 209.1 | 51.4 | 3.0 |
| Calgary | 248.8 | 9.8 | 0.1 |
| Edmonton | 247.4 | 38.4 | 7.0 |
| Vancouver | 122.3 | 9.2 | 0.2 |
| Victoria | 118.7 | 1.1 | 0. |
Should we all be rushing out to buy new houses? Lots of opinions on when and why to buy a house, but I have bought houses when I needed more space, and luckily both times housing prices were a little depressed. I did however buy my first house with a fixed mortgage rate of 12% and I thought that was the best deal I could get at the time (yup that hurt in year 4 of that mortgage when rates had dropped by almost half).
