Uncertainty

The current home sale stats for the Calgary area are rather…unhelpful.

You can clearly see a huge upward trend over the last 10 years, not just this last year. Checking against the city’s assessments, houses are often selling for $100,000 or more over their assessed values.

But things do seem to be cooling off. The average sale price dropped last month, for the first time in quite a while. The percentage of sales versus listings also dropped a lot. Some of the specific listings I’ve been looking at have even dropped their prices by $8-15 thousand. Maybe I should hold off and see if things drop even more.

But there’s no guarantee that the drop is an ongoing trend, and people still seem to think that the labour shortage and oil boom are just going to make things worse. If I wait too long, prices could suddenly turn around and skyrocket even higher. But I don’t really want to overpay by even the current inflated amounts, or get stuck with a crummy home in a bad area.

I think I’ll go hide under the bed for a bit…