Chatham-Kent's real estate market is having a cool start to the year.
According to the Chatham-Kent Association of Realtors, 76 units were sold last month, which is down 29.6% from the all-time February record last year. The association says February 2018's sales were still in line with the ten-year average for that month.
President Steve Carroll says sales were down last month because there was a lack of homes for people to buy.
"It cooled off more from a standpoint that we don't have very much inventory out there for people to look at," explains Carroll. "People are kind of slowed down because they're not seeing a lot of potential homes to look at to buy, so that has affected the activity."
Carroll says normally there would be between 300 to 400 homes on the market at any given time, but now Chatham-Kent is drastically below that.
There were 111 new listings in February, down 4.3% from the same month in 2017. The association says this was the lowest level for the month in three decades.
There were just 210 active residential listings in the association's system at the end of this February, down 13.2% from a year earlier and a record low for this time of year.
Carroll anticipates that the activity will pick up again in the spring.
"We've had a tough winter, which we think has affected things and people are looking forward to spring," explains Carroll. "Once we get rid of the snow and the winter that brings more activity from sellers and potential buyers."
He says average home prices did go up a bit though.
"We're sitting at around $180,000, which is 2% above where we were in January and February of last year. The prices have increased a little bit, which is good for sellers, but we're still very reasonably priced with respect to the rest of Ontario," says Carroll. "[This] is why we're still getting a fairly large influx of people from outside of Chatham-Kent."