Even people from Vancouver and Silicon Valley think K-W housing market is bonkers
CBC
The housing market in Kitchener-Waterloo has gotten so hot that even some recent transplants from Vancouver and Silicon Valley have remarked on it.
In August, John Moon moved to Kitchener from Vancouver with his wife so she could attend a master's degree program at Wilfrid Laurier University.
"Coming from an extremely hot housing market, I thought, we're going to be stepping into something maybe a little bit more economical, and we've seen that's not the case," said Moon, 39, who's renting at the moment near Victoria Park.
Amanda Brijpaul, 50, has found herself in a similar situation after moving with her family to Waterloo from California in July.
"The pace at which the prices have grown here, I think outpaces Silicon Valley growth," said Brijpaul, who is also renting for now but plans to start house-hunting in earnest in the spring.
"The inventories are shockingly low and the price acceleration is shockingly high."
Last week, the KW Association of Realtors announced the average sale price of a detached house reached $1,021,353 in December 2021 – up nearly 35 per cent relative to the same time the previous year.
Similar price increases are being seen across the housing market. The realtors' association says that in December 2021,
It isn't just that prices are going up – homes that come on the market are also being snapped up very quickly.
The number of months of inventory in K-W hit an all-time low of 0.2 in December, said KWAR.
That means, if no new homes were added to the market, it would take less than a month to sell them all, said Megan Bell, president of KWAR.
"We really, really have a lack of supply," said Bell. "It's basically become a perfect storm. We've got low interest rates, no houses on the market, and it just keeps driving the price up."
According to the latest Vital Signs report from the Kitchener-Waterloo Community Foundation, the K-W area had the second-highest price growth in Canada between 2015 and 2021.
The report noted that housing starts have not kept up with population growth, and that local home price-to-income ratios are now comparable with some of the most expensive cities in the world, exceeding New York and Boston.
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