What’s happening with 2 bedroom condo units in Kitchener-Waterloo?
(Transcript)
Well hello there, I’m Keith Marshall
Last week I had a question from someone who follows my spreadsheet videos (How’s the market) and she had a very specific question. That question was “what’s happening with 2 bedroom condo units in Kitchener-Waterloo?” Good question. I realize that my spreadsheet did not address that.
The spreadsheet is something that I’ve been keeping for years actually and I started doing videos of it earlier this year. The spreadsheet is for working with clients, everything that comes up on their automatic notification list or anything that they show interest in I add to the spreadsheet, so I can judge list price, sales price, listings, days on market and a host of other things as well. As it turns out this year, 2020, I haven’t been working with anyone who’s been interested in 2 bedroom condo units in Kitchener-Waterloo. So we’re going to look at that today.
Let’s start with this one. This one is general information on the real estate market in Kitchener Waterloo. Here we’re looking specifically at condos and 2 bedroom condos so this will give us a snapshot of the market as a whole for 2 bedroom condos in Kitchener-Waterloo.
Start with the average price
The average price over the last little while has been somewhere between $380 and $400K.
New listings fell considerably since June, a huge drop! As I’m not working with anyone in this area the market will have to assume it’s the correct. Of course since if the the number new listings has dropped, the number of homes for sale is also going to drop
October. There was only six sales of two bedroom condos in Kitchener Waterloo? Suspect. I’m not so sure but we’re going to go with that anyway.
What’s most interesting here is that the average sale price is around $400,000. The other thing that is important, I think, just to get some benchmarks here, is the average price per square foot. That looks like it’s about $420. $400 to $420. So the average price per square foot in Kitchener-Waterloo market for 2 bedroom condos as a whole is about $400. $410 let’s say
Because this is another spreadsheet video let’s go to the spreadsheet now to look at 3 condos just because I wanted a bigger market sample. I’ve chosen three buildings fairly randomly. One is in Waterloo. One is in Midtown and one’s in Kitchener.
The one in Waterloo is at 265 Westcourt, built in 1987 we got enough sales over the last year-and-a-half, we might be able to see some trends here.
As you can see, list price it has been going up a little bit since September $479 compared to this one listed in June of 2019 at $425. That’s a $50,000 or more than a 10% gain in list price. Sales price though did not reflect that and that’s why I’m looking at sales price per square foot. Normally I don’t use his metric when looking at houses but I think it’s important since we are looking at something fairly small, condo units and you’ll see here that it averages out about $350. However we got a couple of penthouses here although these ones didn’t sell for that much more I’m going to knock them both out of our equation. They are a special kind of property. And then we’re at $333 per square foot.
Let’s look at another building. This one, 539 Belmont, is just south of Belmont Village, is kind of on the fringes of Midtown. Things are not in the core or they’re all close to the core but not and they’re very similar in that regard. At 539 Belmont, it was built in 2012, so it’s one of our newer buildings. Before I go there, the list price to sales price ratio for condo units in this building is 5% over list price. As you know from the monthly videos about the housing market, the market as a whole, the market for my clients who are not looking for condo units is about 10%.
Condos are not in quite as high demand or at least the demand is not reflected in this list price to sales ratio. Again I’m going to knock both of the penthouses cuz they’re skewing the data. $412 sales price per square foot. And selling for essentially 2% below list price.
These are taking 7 days to sell as well.
Come back up and talk about these three in a little more detail
260 Sheldon Street built in 1977. Now these units are much smaller. These are all under a thousand square feet but you’ll see that the sales price per square foot is very similar to the… well it’s about halfway between these two once you knock out penthouses.
I’m assuming that this one doesn’t have penthouses. Maybe we weren’t doing that back in 1977. Almost 20 days to sell.
That’s a snapshot of those buildings
There was one other thing I wanted to show you and that’s this one. Here, as you know, I always say, as you know, I don’t know if you know this or not but in the morning I tend to read as much real estate news is I can take. This one is about Canadian real estate prices. Condos now in some markets like Toronto, there’s been headlines that say that the prices are actually falling. I don’t know if it’s true or not because I don’t follow the Toronto Market but this one has a couple of neat statistics in it and if you’re interested in condos it’s a pretty good website to follow. Go to January 2020 you’ll see apartments selling for an average, this is Canada wide for this much and then it is kind of plateaus. Nothing really happened here. Single family homes just kept going up and up and up. And then this is one. This is the 12-month percentage change comparing this month this year to this month last year, which is something real estate loves to do and you’ll see again that here we are in March of 2020 and the percentage change is around 5 or 6% whereas for single-family homes were at 12% and 10% and yeah so you can see where these two different markets within the real estate markets diverged.
That’s all I got to say about that
So what’s happening with two bedroom condo units? Prices are still growing. Most of the homes are selling for some percentage over list price but there are buildings like this one that are not. Now there’s probably a couple of good reasons that these ones are being listed artificially high or I guess you could say that or they’re not in step with the how the typical prices in our market are behaving.
I think I’ll just leave it at that. I can go into detail with it but it’s really just speculation on my part. So what’s important here is if you are looking at a certain building a two-bedroom condo unit in a certain building and I think maybe I should do a video like this about the student apartments the student neighbourhood and see how they’re behaving because different buildings do behave differently.
So that’s all I’ve got for you today.
I’m Keith Marshall with what’s happening with two bedroom condo units in Kitchener-Waterloo
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