Home sales and home prices across Chatham-Kent keep climbing.
According to the Chatham-Kent Association of Realtors, the average price of homes sold in April 2021 was a record $424,321, up nearly 47 per cent from $289,057 in April 2020.
The dollar value of all home sales in April 2021 was $69.6 million, more than double the levels from a year earlier, jumping 259 per cent from the same month in 2020 and setting a new record for the month of April in Chatham-Kent.
There were 164 units sold last month, a 145 per cent increase from the year before. That total also marked another new record for the month of April locally and the third-highest total of any single month on record.
"Home sales were 37.6 per cent above the five-year average and 38 per cent above the 10-year average for the month of April," the Chatham-Kent Association of Realtors said in a media release. "On a year-to-date basis, home sales totaled a record 553 units over the first four months of the year. This was a substantial gain of 58 per cent from the same period in 2020."
The number of homes that hit the market in the municipality also saw a substantial increase last month.
There were 221 new residential listings in April 2021, which is a 151 per cent jump from the year before and the largest number of new listings added in the month of April in five years.
However, the number of active listings saw a decline in Chatham-Kent in April.
By the end of the month, there were 115 active residential listings on the market, 29 per cent less than the end of April 2020 and the lowest number of active listings that there have been in Chatham-Kent in three decades.
At the end of April 2021, months of inventory was at just 0.7, well below the long-run average of 3.6 months for this time of year. The number of months of inventory is the number of months it would take to sell current inventories at the current rate of sales activity.
Despite this, Chatham-Kent Association of Realtors President Laura Tourangea said overall, inventory is starting to rise slowly.
"With the spring market in full swing, we are starting to see outsized year-over-year percentage gains because of the extremely low numbers posted last year. Although these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, it should not detract from the incredible string of records we have seen and continue to see in our region," she said. "With new listings above both the five and 10-year averages and outnumbering sales for the last few months, overall inventory appears to have set a floor and is now slowly rising."