I recently wrote about the madness that appears to have returned to Burnaby real estate.
“I call it multiple offer madness,” a Burnaby real estate agent told me. “Things have heated up.”
Well, here’s another sign of just how out of control things have gotten in the local housing market.
I was messaged from someone I follow on Twitter and they told me about how they had just gotten “outbid” on a house.
The house was on the market at $1.3 million, which is wild stuff.
In all, 43 offers were submitted on this one house – yes, a whopping 43. Thirteen of those offers were all cash.
When the dust had settled, the house had sold for $1,618,000 – so more than $300,000 over the asking price.
It's a return of "way-over-asking insanity" in the market.
Back to the drawing board for this couple, who are now looking at a townhouse they think hasn’t gotten much notice.
Crazy, crazy stuff. This is good news for sellers, but bad news for buyers who were enjoying a big of a break on prices. The problem with so many offers is it not only drives up the price, but it makes buyers give up things like conducting home inspections.
From October to December 2020, detached housing sales in Burnaby skyrocketed 28% compared to the same three months in 2019, according to the latest data from the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver (REBGV). Sales of attached homes, such as townhouses, jumped 27% during the same period.
As for prices, December prices in Burnaby East jumped 14.3% compared with December 2019, while Burnaby North went up 10.6% and Burnaby South 5.7%.
Residential sales surged 53.4% year over year last month to a hit a new all-time record in the region, according to the REBGV.
A total of 3,093 units were sold in December 2020, up from the 2,016 sales recorded the same month a year earlier.
It also marks a 0.9% increase from November 2020.
The latest gains were 57.7% above the 10-year December sales average.
For the year, the region tallied a total of 30,944 home sales. That’s up 22.1% from the 25,351 sales recorded in 2019 and represents a 25.7% increase compared with the 24,618 sales in 2018.
However, the 2020 sales are still 2.8% below the 10-year sales average.
This decline comes after different levels of government began introducing measures to cool down white-hot markets in Vancouver and Toronto.
But the pandemic has brought on measures from the Bank of Canada to keep the economy chugging, including record-low interest rates.
The benchmark price for all residential properties, including condos and detached homes, across Metro Vancouver reached $1,047,400 by the end of 2020.
That’s up 5.4% from a year earlier.
- With files from Tyler Orton, Business in Vancouver
Follow Chris Campbell on Twitter @shinebox44.
