Toronto - Home sales around the GTA for the month of May are running ahead of last year's pace.
Prices are holding steady even with the concerns about the economy.
After a brutal start to the year things seem to have stabilized in the real-estate market.
The Toronto real-estate board said that in the first two weeks of may there were 4,500 sales.
That number is up by 3 per cent compared to last year.
The average selling price was just shy of $400,000, which is almost the same as a year ago.
Sales of homes in Canada, seasonally adjusted, jumped 11.2 per cent last month from March, the largest month-to-month increase in more than five years, according to the latest numbers from the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA).
The gain compounds advances of 10.3 per cent in February and 7.7 per cent in March.
Rock-bottom mortgage rates and prices that are 3.2 per cent lower than a year ago, on average, are the main reasons for the rebound, said Robert Kavcic, an economist at BMO Nesbitt Burns.
Mortgage rates in Canada, which have plunged by almost 50 percent in the last year, aren’t likely to fall further, said Phil Soper, chief executive officer of Brookfield Real Estate Services Fund.
“Certainly with the Bank of Canada’s target rate set at virtually zero, there’s very little room,” Soper said today at a conference in Toronto on Canada’s real estate market. The rate is “the lowest it’s been in anyone in this room’s lifetime.”
Rates for home loans have been dropping during the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, with some lenders offering mortgages approaching 4 percent, Soper said. That compares with an average posted five-year rate of 7.5 percent a year ago, according to the Bank of Canada. He added that home prices in Canada aren’t likely to rise “sharply” over the next two years.
The mayor of Montreal says they will cooperate fully with the SQ now that it's investigating some questionable real estate deals made by the city's housing and development corporation.
"It is effectively troubling and worriesome, " says Quebec Municipal Affairs Minister Nathalie Normandeau, after reading the report by Montreal's auditor general. Those are words the auditor general himself used in describing the real estate transactions: property sold far below market value or without proper authorization, out of 300-million dollars worth of land and buildings.
But Montreal mayor Gerald Tremblay insists officials with the corporation and its board of director made decisions without their knowledge.