TORONTO — Record home sales last month are based on low supply and high demand and are more likely to drop off this year than inflate a housing bubble that could threaten a fragile recovery, economists say.
A Canadian Real Estate Association report released Friday said December and the 2009 fourth quarter were the best periods on record for home resales, while prices also rose sharply from their year-earlier levels.
Meanwhile, strong demand continued to deplete the number of homes for sale and the estimated 5.6 months it would take to sell a house through the Multiple Listing Service in December was less than half the 12.3 months it would have taken a year earlier.
The number of total listings fell 22 per cent in December from the same 2008 period and 12.6 per cent for the year.
The imbalance in supply and demand drove the national average price of homes to $337,410 in December, 19 per cent higher than in December 2008, but slightly lower than the 2009 average of $348,840.
Douglas Porter, deputy chief economist at BMO Capital Markets said while high prices caused by strong demand and weak supply could pose a risk to the fragile recovery, he is not willing to jump on the “bubble bandwagon” yet.
A bubble occurs when prices increase without any sound underlying fundamentals, he explained, and that’s not the case in Canada’s housing market, which is closely tied to changing interest rates and economic fundamentals.
“We still do have a relatively tight supply situation and exceptionally low interest rates and a mild recovery in the economy, so there are a lot of good reasons why home prices are rising.”
“What we’re seeing is almost textbook recovery,” he said. “The speed of the recovery is mind-boggling, the fact that housing is leading the recovery is really not a surprise… it’s exactly what you’d expect to happen.”
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said Friday he does not see a housing bubble yet, but he noted the government has many tools at its disposal — from raising down payment requirements on insured mortgages, to lowering amortization periods and urging the banks to be more cautious in their lending — to prevent such a thing from happening.
“We don’t want to have a group of house purchasers who purchased houses now at insured mortgages at relatively low rates who would not be able to manage them if rates were to increase later on,” Flaherty said in an interview with Business News Network, a cable TV business channel in Toronto.
“I’ve looked at the numbers with CMHC,” he added. “We’re monitoring it. I do not see evidence of a bubble right now, but we’re going to keep watching it. There are some steps we can take that we will take if it’s necessary.”
The association said 27,744 units were sold across Canada in December, up 72 per cent from the same month in 2008. The year-earlier period saw the lowest sales in a decade in the wake of a global credit crunch and the start of the recession in Canada.
The Kitchener-Waterloo Real Estate Board set a record in December with 356 sales. The Real Estate Board of Cambridge recorded 150 sales, up 60 per cent from the same month a year earlier.
December also marked the end of the strongest quarterly sales volume ever measured by CREA, with 137,957 homes sold over three months on a seasonally adjusted basis — up 2.6 per cent from the previous record set in the first quarter of 2007.
“CREA’s latest statistics will no doubt spark further bubble talk amongst the usual suspects,” said the association’s chief economist Gregory Klump. “(But) cooler heads recognize that many of the recent gains reflect temporary factors that could fade by summer.”
The 59 per cent year-over-year fourth quarter gain drove last year’s annual sales volume above 2008 levels, but the number of transactions last year was 10.7 per cent below the peak reached in 2007.
“The extraordinary decline in activity one year ago and subsequent rebound, particularly for higher-priced real estate, is stretching current year-over-year comparisons,” said Klump.
Klump believes the market will balance out in 2010 because consumer demand will be met with a supply side rise as the number of new homes increases and cautious homeowners become confident about selling, which will add more homes on the market and help drive prices down.
Porter said Friday’s report signals that Canadians have regained their confidence in the economy and the surge in demand is beginning to be met with a serious supply response, citing a notable uptick in December housing starts.
“Builders had been very cautious and they’re only now starting to crank up their output again, but even so, the comeback in new housing starts has been much more modest than the rebound we’ve seen in sales,” he said. “And people who own homes have also been a little reluctant to put their house up for sale because of the broader uncertainty that we’ve seen.”
He said that the demand in housing was most pronounced in B.C. and Ontario, where home buyers might be hoping to beat the introduction of the HST, the harmonized sales tax which is set to replace provincial taxes in those provinces later this year.
The Bank of Canada indicated last week that it was premature to be talking about a housing bubble in Canada and said recent house price increases are in line with supply and demand fundamentals.
The bank considers the current hot market to be a phenomenon based on temporary factors, such as pent-up demand from the recession, and low mortgage rates.
A CIBC forecast released Thursday indicated that the hot housing market will continue to drive economic growth during the first half of 2010, but will come to a screeching halt in the second half of the year, when interest rates are expected to rise.