A slower week in the real estate market wrapped up a volatile September for Vancouver home sales, in which total Greater Vancouver sales were not as high as in August, reveals MLS® data for September 25-October 1.
There were 29 detached home sales within Vancouver proper that week, registered by October 12 – although the Thanksgiving Day long weekend could have delayed some registrations. Nevertheless, that’s notably lower than the 40 single-family homes sold the week before.
Townhome and similar attached-home transactions, always fewer in number and therefore more changeable, fell to just 17 sales during that same week, far below the 32 attached units of the previous week.
Only condo sales in the city reasonably held their own, with 102 units so far registered as sold during September 25-October 1. That’s a little – but not dramatically – lower than the 122 units of the week before, and still a healthy figure.
Median sale prices were similarly wobbly that week. The median price of those 29 detached homes sold was $1,866,000 – significantly lower than the last few weeks. This varies wildly between Vancouver West (West Side, Downtown West and West End), where the median of the 14 houses sold was $3,745,000, and Vancouver East (East Side and Downtown East), which saw 15 house sales at a median of $1,555,000.
The lower overall median sale price could be because a greater volume of detached homes are selling at the less-expensive end of the price spectrum, rather than individual homes seeing typically lower sale prices than previously. Certainly the median listing price for Vancouver detached houses has not seen similar wobbles, hanging on doggedly to its near-$3 million position as of October 12.
Townhouses, which have for the past weeks been selling at a median of approximately $1.4 million across the city, slipped considerably during the same period to $995,000, in what was a poor week for that property type.
With demand for condos unrelenting, median condo sale prices that week bucked the trend by increasing to $762,500, which is around $90K more than the previous week. This breaks down as $775K in Vancouver West and $100,000 less than that in Vancouver East, at $675K. The median listing price for a condo in the city, as of October 12, was exactly the same as the previous week, at $949,000.
Conquering the priciest home sales charts for that week, of the sales registered by October 12, was a six-bedroom, six-bathroom home in desirable South Granville. This 6,000-plus-square-foot renovated house took 177 days to sell for $1,138,000 under its asking price, going for $5.85 million.
The top-priced condo sale of the same week was a very chic, 1,327-square-foot condo in the residential part of the Telus Garden building in downtown Vancouver. This 39th-floor unit has super-high-end finishings, three bedrooms and city and mountain views for days. It sold for $2.1 million, $95K under asking, after 39 days on the market.
Joannah Connolly is the editor of REW.ca.
