London #1 For Housing Deals

Friday, Jan 29, 2016

Whether you’re a home buyer or a seller, there’s lots to like in London.

We’re the hottest, affordable housing market in the country, a new national realtor’s survey suggests.

London ranks No. 1 among cities in Canada for reasonably-priced homes, those going for less than $500,000.

Good as that is, the city also boasts a hot market that’s seen the average home value rise by double-digit levels in the past year, the survey by Royal LePage Canada indicates.

That means London — its economy firing again, with one of the lowest big-city jobless rates in Canada — is not only an enviable place to find work these days, but also for people buying and selling real estate.

“London always does well in the surveys,” Stacey Evoy, president of the London St. Thomas Association of Realtors, said Wednesday.

“I am not surprised,” she added. “We never have the big bubbles like Toronto and Vancouver. We seem to have a bump up every year in home prices.”

Royal LePage says the average home value in London in the third quarter of 2015 was up 11.3 per cent from the same period a year earlier, when it stood at $263,668.

The Royal LePage figures apply only to the London market.

When nearby Middlesex County and St. Thomas are included, the average house value drops, figures compiled by the area real estate board show.

In third-quarter 2015, the average value of homes in the wider market was 4.3 per cent higher than in the same quarter of 2014, $263,647 versus $252,674.

For last year as a whole, the average area home value was $264,435, up 4.1 per cent from 2014.

Any way you cut it, however, the London market is still a bargain compared to the stratospheric prices in cities such as Toronto and Vancouver, where red-hot markets have driven averages through the roof — past the $1-million mark, in Royal LePage’s numbers for Vancouver — and fuelled tightened mortgage rules requiring Canadians to put down more of their own money on the portion of insured mortgages greater than $500,000.

With its solid growth and more affordable prices, the London market is attractive to many, said Evoy. “People are becoming serious about investing in real estate as a retirement nest egg, moving from Toronto. We are seeing more of that,” she said.

That increase in the home-value market is largely in resale homes, with the new home-building sector seeing slower growth, but still trending up, said Doug Wastell, a London builder and past-president of the London Home Builders’ Association.

“We are happy with the way things are going, we are busy and hiring more staff,” he said.

“It’s mostly driven by the resale market, which is good. Last year was good for builders, and this year will be better,” he said.

Wastell forecasts that stability and slow, steady growth in building will trend up for about five years. His company has about 40 homes now under construction.

“I think it is going to be very positive,” he said.

The growing value of resale homes is another in a list of economic indicators powering ahead in London.

Over the last year, the London-St. Thomas region created 9,300 new jobs, a 3.8 per cent increase in employment that dropped the area’s jobless rate to 6.2 per cent — better than both the national and Ontario averages. London also cracked the Top 10 in a Bank of Montreal national ranking of job markets, moving up eight spots from a year earlier.

Area realtors also notched a strong year, selling 9,366 homes in 2015.

--- --- ---

THE NUMBERS

Third-quarter 2015 average home prices versus third-quarter 2014

LONDON

2015: $293,344

2014: $263,668

Rounding out the Top Five were Oshawa, Whitby, Kingston and Hamilton.