Home Price Indexes Down in November in All Markets Except Quebec City, Halifax and Victoria

December 12th, 2018

DECEMBER 12, 2018

Home price indexes down in November in all markets except Quebec City, Halifax and Victoria

In November the Teranet–National Bank National Composite House Price IndexTM was down 0.3% from the previous month.[1] A November decline is not the norm – this was only the fourth in 20 years of index history. It was the second consecutive monthly decline. November’s retreat was quite broad-based: component indexes were down on the month in eight of the 11 metropolitan markets surveyed – Vancouver (−0.6%), Calgary (−0.6%), Edmonton (−0.6%), Winnipeg (−0.5%), Ottawa-Gatineau (−0.4%), Toronto (−0.1%), Hamilton (−0.1%) and Montreal (−0.1%). The index for Victoria was flat. Indexes were up for Halifax (0.1%) and Quebec City (1.2%). The decline of the Montreal index, the first in eight months, was hardly enough to end its upward trend over those months – a cumulative rise of 4.4%, consistent with seller’s-market conditions. Market conditions are quite different in Calgary, where the index has now declined four months in a row, for a cumulative loss of 1.4%. The index for Toronto has retreated 0.4% over the last three months.

Teranet-National Bank National Composite House Price Index™

In November the composite index was up 3.1% from a year earlier, a larger 12-month rise than in the last three months thanks to an abrupt index decline from August to October of 2017. As a result of gains earlier this year, November 12‑month rises were above the countrywide average in Victoria (5.3%), Ottawa-Gatineau (5.3%), Montreal (4.4%), Hamilton (4.4%), Vancouver (3.9%) and Toronto (3.3%). Indexes were also up from a year earlier in Winnipeg (2.3%) and Halifax (1.7%). Indexes were down from a year earlier in Quebec City (−0.3%), Edmonton (−0.4%) and Calgary (−2.7%).

Besides the Toronto and Hamilton indexes included in the composite index, indexes exist for seven other urban areas of the Golden Horseshoe. In November, most of these were down or at best flat from the previous month: Brantford (−0.8%), Guelph (−0.6%), Oshawa (−0.6%), Peterborough (−0.3%), Barrie (flat) and St. Catharines (flat). The exception was Kitchener (+0.6%). Two of these indexes, Barrie and Oshawa, were, like Toronto and Hamilton, below their peaks of Q3 2017. All were up from a year earlier, the gains ranging 1.3% for Oshawa to 8.9% for Peterborough.

Indexes not included in the composite index also exist for seven markets outside the Golden Horseshoe, five of them in Ontario and two in B.C. In November five of them were down from the previous month: Sudbury (−1.6%), Abbotsford-Mission (−0.5%), London (−0.3%), Kelowna (−0.1%) and Thunder Bay (−0.1%). Two of them were up: Windsor (+0.6%) and Kingston (+0.6%). The changes of these indexes from a year earlier ranged from −3.0% for Thunder Bay to +12.8 % for Windsor.

For the full report including historical data, please visit: www.housepriceindex.ca.