Tuesday, May 5, 2020
The First Impacts of the Health Crisis are Being Felt on Montreal's Residential Real Estate Market
The First Impacts of the Health Crisis are Being Felt on Montreal’s Residential Real Estate Market
Although March 2020 was one of the busiest months of March on record, the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to a definite slowdown in the second half of the month.
“In Quebec, Montreal is the CMA that is most affected by the spread of the virus, due to the city’s greater exposure to international trade and the size and density of its population,” explained Charles Brant, Director of the QPAREB’s Market Analysis Department. “As a result, this market is exposed to psychological stress caused by stricter distancing measures and greater economic uncertainty. These factors help explain the faster and more pronounced drop in transactions compared to other regions, notably that of Quebec City,” he added.
The relatively high level of activity in March was due to the conclusion of transactions initiated earlier in the year. In addition, the real estate market was boosted by three consecutive drops in interest rates (-150 basis points!) in March, bringing rates to levels that are comparable to those seen in 2008 during the last financial crisis.
“In contrast to what we’ve been seeing since the start of the year, April and May are expected to be among the least active months recorded for a spring season since the start of the millennium,” added Mr. Brant. “In a context where uncertainty about the economic outcome of this crisis is very high, we can expect buyers and sellers to remain on the sidelines. However, far from being in a downturn situation, the market will, rather, be on pause.”
In total, 5,907 residential sales transactions were concluded in March 2020, a 4 per cent increase compared to March of last year. Still, this was the 61st consecutive month of sales growth. For the first quarter of the year, 14,662 transactions were concluded in the Montreal CMA, a 13 per cent increase compared to the first quarter of 2019.
Sales by geographic area
- The areas of Laval, Vaudreuil-Soulanges, the North Shore and Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu stood out with particularly strong sales increases of 18, 16, 14 and 9 per cent.
- In contrast, the Island of Montreal registered a significant drop in transactions (-5 per cent), while sales were unchanged on the South Shore.
- Sales increased for all three property categories across the CMA. Sales of single-family homes (3,348 transactions) rose by 6 per cent while sales of condominiums (2,089 transactions) grew by 1 per cent. Sales of plexes (466 transactions) jumped by 12 per cent.
- The median price of single-family homes across the CMA continued to rise sharply, increasing by 10 per cent to reach $365,000. The median price of condominiums also rose significantly, jumping by 16 per cent to reach $287,000.
- The median price of plexes (2 to 5 dwellings) reached $610,375, an increase of 22 per cent compared to March of last year.
In March, there were 14,070 active residential listings in the Montreal CMA. This represents a 37 per cent drop compared to March of last year.
The number of new listings fell by 22 per cent, which is consistent with the beginning of a wait-and-see attitude by sellers in the context of uncertainty and an expected marked slowdown in the real estate market. The social distancing measures put in place by the provincial government are the main cause.
“While activity on the resale market slowed somewhat in the Montreal CMA in March, price growth acceleration continued in a market that is still extremely tight, and was accompanied by a significant drop in interest rates,” said Julie Saucier, president and chief executive officer of the QPAREB. “The context we are going through will at least have the advantage of protecting Montreal from runaway price increases, as was the case in other Canadian markets. It will also guarantee greater price stability over the medium term as we emerge from the crisis,” she added.
For March 2020 and year-to-date statistics charts, click here.
About the Quebec Professional Association of Real Estate Brokers
The Quebec Professional Association of Real Estate Brokers (QPAREB) is a non-profit association that brings together more than 13,000 real estate brokers and agencies. It is responsible for promoting and defending their interests while taking into account the issues facing the profession and the various professional and regional realities of its members. The QPAREB is also an important player in many real estate dossiers, including the implementation of measures that promote homeownership.
The Association reports on Quebec’s residential real estate market statistics, provides training, tools and services relating to real estate, and facilitates the collection, dissemination and exchange of information. The QPAREB is headquartered in Quebec City and has its administrative offices in Montreal. It has two subsidiaries: Centris Inc. and the Collège de l’immobilier du Québec. Follow its activities at qpareb.ca or via its social media pages: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.
About Centris
Centris.ca is Quebec’s real estate industry website for consumers, grouping all properties for sale by a real estate broker under the same address. Société Centris provides real estate industry stakeholders with access to real estate data and a wide range of technology tools. Centris also manages the collaboration system used by more than 13,000 real estate brokers in Quebec.
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For more information:| Taïssa Hrycay Director Communications and Marketing 1-888-762-2440 or 514-762-2440, ext. 157 media@qpareb.ca |
Saturday, April 25, 2020
Canadian housing prices will prove remarkably robust
Canadian home prices to weather the worst of the pandemic
by Ephraim Vecina 16 Apr 2020
Despite the ravages of the pandemic, Canadian housing prices will prove remarkably robust, according to Royal LePage.In its recent analysis, Royal LePage projected that the widespread economic weakness brought about by COVID-19 will pull down Canada’s average housing price by just 3% this year, should the slowdown last until late summer.
This will put the nationwide aggregate home price at $627,900. More optimistic estimates place the outbreak’s impact being contained to just the second quarter, which might lead to an annual price increase of 1% to $653,800.
The first quarter saw the aggregate Canadian home price increase by 4.4% year-over-year to $655,276. Last December, Royal LePage predicted prices to grow by 3.2% in 2020.
“From our experience with past recessions and real estate downturns, we are not expecting significant year-over-year price changes in 2020,” Royal LePage President and CEO Phil Soper said.
“Home price declines occur when the market experiences sustained low sales volume while inventory builds. Currently, the inventory of homes for sale in this country is very low, matching low sales volumes as people respect government mandates to stay at home.”
However, Soper cautioned that social distancing policies and lockdowns will be moderating factors that will place “downward pressure on both home sales volumes and prices.”
“Equally, if the collective efforts of Canadians slow the spread of the disease to manageable levels, and if promising science and therapeutic drugs are announced, people will return to their jobs, market confidence will bounce back quickly, and we could see Canada’s real markets roar back to life, with 2020 transactions delayed but not eliminated,” he said.
Friday, April 24, 2020
Back to work for real estate brokers, but it won't be exactly business as usual.
The Quebec government has authorized
the province's real-estate brokers to get back to work during the COVID-19
pandemic, but it won't exactly be business as usual. The brokers have been
granted permission to work only on transactions deemed to be a priority,
defined as those that must be completed before July 31.
The brokers have been granted permission to work only on transactions deemed to be a priority, defined as those that must be completed before July 31.
The Organisme d'autoreglementation du courtage immobilier du Quebec (OACIQ), the agency that regulates real-estate brokers in Quebec, said it has sent directives to ensure that public-health orders put in place during the pandemic are respected.
Open houses are not allowed, and
in-person visits and home inspections must respect physical distancing
guidelines.
No broker, or any party involved in
a physical interaction regarding a transaction, can have COVID-19 or any of its
symptoms and must sign a document attesting to that.
- Complete coverage at CTVNews.ca/coronavirus
- Coronavirus newsletter sign-up: Get The COVID-19 Brief sent to your inbox
During in-person visits, the current
occupants of a property must wait outside. Only one person can enter the
property along with the broker, maintaining a two-metre distance at all times.
No children or people over 70 may take part in a visit.
Parties involved in a transaction
must also sign a document confirming that the sale is urgent.
The brokers are also being asked to
work remotely as much as possible.
Brokers who do not respect the
directives could face disciplinary measures from the OACIQ, which is reminding
its members that not respecting the current public health orders means breaking
the law.
http://app.dialoginsight.com/T/OFC4/L2S/6384/B2729374/uZYA/746238/28076848/FQZuco/2/18239850/WV7oSskK/I/759255/EG7bln.html?h=tc6maVZNwm_B8zXN-khYeucL8tonUk0u70vnFO_xq7U
Tuesday, April 21, 2020
Just checking in....
Just checking in on you.
How are you?
Call us. We're a phone call away.
Diane + Paul Laflamme
Courtiers immobilier
Royal LePage Village
514.793.4514
Monday, April 20, 2020
Happy Monday!
Have a great day!
The sun is shining.
We are connected to your community.
Diane + Paul Laflamme
Royal LePage Village
514.715.4514
Thursday, April 9, 2020
Happy Easter. Stay safe and stay home.
Wishing all our family, friends close and away, clients a very Happy Easter!
Paul and I hope you're all healthy and safe.
Take care and stay home.
Diane + Paul Laflamme
Royal LePage Village
514.715.4514
Thursday, April 2, 2020
Call us, if you need us!
Diane + Paul Laflamme
Courtiers Immobilier
Royal LePage Village
514.715.4514
Let's try to get along
Friday, March 27, 2020
Open Concept Interior Design
The Case for Rooms
It’s time to end the tyranny of open-concept interior design.
If someone asked me in 2013 whether or not I thought the open floor plan would still be popular, I would have said no. Domestic architecture seemed to be taking a turn toward the rustic. In 2018, “Farmhouse” and “Craftsman” modern designs, harkening back to the American vernacular tradition (complete with shiplap walls), are a tour-de-force.
Much has been written about the open floor plan: how it came to be, why
it is bad (or good), whether it should or shouldn’t be applied to
existing housing. The open floor plan as we currently understand it—an
entry-kitchen-dining-living combination that avoids any kind of
structural separation between uses—is only a few decades old. Prior to
the last 25 years, an “open floor plan” meant a living configuration
without
doors; now the term has come to mean a living configuration without
walls. I will refer to the latter from now on as an “open concept,” in order to differentiate it from a traditional open floor plan.
An open-concept house in Massachusetts in 2005. Photo by Michael Dwyer/AP.
The interior-wall-free open concept became popular
starting in the 1970s, evolving from the cedar contemporary homes known
for their tall ceilings and windows, and from
styled ranches
whose steeper rooflines allowed for newly in-vogue cathedral ceilings.
Overall, the open concept was a reaction against years of small,
low-ceilinged living, which felt restricting and stuffy to a new
generation of homebuyers.
That this would start with the kitchen is not
surprising. Historically, the kitchen was the last room to be integrated
into the open concept. Living and dining rooms began to converge as
early as the beginning of the 1900s, when changes in architectural taste
and the development of mass-industrialized housing production favored a
more compact home design than the rambling, formal “hall-and-parlor”
layout of Victorian times.
Wealthy families in the 18th and 19th
centuries had homes with several rooms for specific purposes, such as
parlors, libraries, drawing rooms, smoking rooms, and servants’
quarters. Then, new building materials and construction technologies led
to shifts in architectural taste that favored more continuous interior
spaces: First came the Arts & Crafts movement, then Modernism.
Social changes that arose with modern industrial capitalism, such as the
transition away from live-in servants to commuting wage-workers, also
reduced the number of rooms in upper-class houses. However,
in the homes of the working and lower-middle classes, these same
factors of social change and modernization created an opposite
progression. The story of common houses is a story of walls.
The number of rooms in working-class homes increased with the number of
products and amenities that became readily affordable through
industrialization, modernization, and mass production. The common house,
as well as working-class living environments such as dwelling houses
and tenements, only had one to three rooms: a kitchen space and a living
and/or sleeping space, which were multipurpose, used for working as
well as living.
Beginning in the 1860s, work increasingly took place outside of the home, and the application of mass production to housing reduced building costs. During this period, the average number of rooms increased, to three to five: a kitchen, a living room, and one or two bedrooms. Common vernacular examples of this period (1860-1900) include the worker’s cottage, the shotgun house, the Temple-and-Wing house, and early examples of the four-box and Foursquare. In these early industrial-era homes, the threshold between working-class and middle-class was determined by amenities like a dining room or a front porch.
By the 1900s and 1910s, mass single-family housing shipped to the site
by rail and truck had come into its own. Now sizes and types of wood,
nails, and other construction materials had become widely standardized
across the building industry. During the second half of the 19th
century, a key development—
balloon framing—allowed
for more inexpensive construction, since the cheap materials (nails,
studs, and 2x4s) were readily available and did not required skilled
labor to assemble, unlike timber framing. Long, lightweight studs and
the clever, basket-like technique of assembly enabled taller and longer homes to be built by as few as two people and with relatively little waste.
Two of the most common and recognizable types of vernacular American housing—the bungalow and the Foursquare—became massively popular during this time. The average number of rooms per house increased once again. Working-class homes now had three to five rooms; middle-class homes, six to eight. Whether or not a home was determined to be working- or middle-class depended on whether it had indoor plumbing (bathrooms!) or electricity, both of which had become increasingly available.
Architectural historians place a great deal of emphasis on the
bungalow, often citing it as the beginning of the “open” floor plan,
since many bungalows omitted the closed wall between the living and
dining areas. However, these historians focus on high-style Arts &
Crafts bungalows, which featured more inventive architecture, and ignore
the fact that in working-and-middle class bungalows, the average number
of individual (closed) rooms increased as a whole.
Only in more elaborate middle-class bungalows is the wall between the
living and dining room separated by a partial wall or colonnade. This
feature was more expensive to construct, because it required structural
loads to be redistributed to other walls or fixtures. Structural reasons
in general were why, in common houses, open spaces would not become
more widespread until changes in construction made them more affordable.
Even as plans in elite houses continued to open up throughout the 1920s,
the common house retained its interior walls. Why? In many respects,
closed rooms existed to maintain a semblance of privacy. Homes were
smaller, but families were bigger than they are now: The average number
of people in an American household was five in 1880 and 4.3 in 1920;
today, it’s 2.5. The reason why the first door to be omitted was
frequently that between the living and dining rooms was because those
rooms were considered “public” spaces, a holdover from the
hall-and-parlor Victorian times.
Work areas, such as the kitchen, and private spaces, like bedrooms and
bathrooms, were always closed off to avoid guests seeing the mess of
meal-making or, heaven forbid, the “unmentionable room” (the bathroom).
By the end of the 1920s, the large, old-growth trees that produced the
long studs central to the technique of balloon framing became scarce,
leading to new techniques that could be completed with smaller spans of
wood. Today’s style of framing, platform framing, enabled more flexible
room shapes and sizes.
The small
minimal traditional houses
of the 1930s through early ‘50s employed this new framing technique on a
mass, federally-subsidized scale. These small homes relied on interior
walls to ensure spatial privacy (not to mention aural, olfactory, and
visual privacy) in cramped situations. The closed floor plan also
represented security, isolation, and control, concepts that were
important in a moment that emerged from the Depression and then World
War II, and deepened through a period of intense racial tension and Cold
War paranoia.
The ranch and the split-level, both of which originated in the
mid-1940s, drastically changed patterns of dwelling in the American
home. This is often cited as the spark that lit the fire of the open
concept. The reorientation of the ideal American home, from vertical, two-story Cape Cod to horizontal, one-story ranch, certainly did open up
floor plans. By this point, a continuous living and dining space was
commonplace.
However, one room remained stubbornly closed for at least another decade: the kitchen. Kitchens have been closed for most of the history of common housing.
In elite houses, kitchens were places of work, where servants were kept
out of sight of residents and guests, often relegated to the cellar or
guesthouse. This functional separation was continued in middle-class
houses, even as live-in servants became a feature of the past. Most
kitchens are placed in the rear of the house. Access to a rear kitchen
door allowed for faster disposal of waste and easy ventilation; also,
deliveries could be made directly to the kitchen to save labor.
Kitchens began to open up and become public spaces in the home because
of cultural shifts regarding consumption. Domestic theorist Christine
Frederick’s term “creative waste” sums up this new mentality: It was the
moral obligation of the 1920s housewife to buy and discard products,
one that elevated the concept of waste as being positive, indulgent, and
stimulating to the economy.
This attitude merged with new technological advances. When inventions
such as central air conditioning and improved fire suppression became
commonplace, the kitchen, no longer a place of shame and no longer
reliant upon the ventilation provided by the kitchen door, began to
shift to different parts of the home. The attached garage often replaced the backyard as the common point of entry into the kitchen.
Room layout, which more often than not had its roots in social and
practical constraints, became liberated due to these new cultures of
consumption and technologies of comfort. Without these developments, the
open concept would have never been possible in the first place.
If closed floor plans are considered such a nuisance these days, why
did they prevail for almost 100 years in single-family working- and
middle-class suburban housing? The answer: closed floor plans make a lot
of sense, from both an environmental and a living perspective.
We are going to need to consume a lot less energy if we want to stem
the tide of global climate change. The good news is, humans survived for
thousands of years without air conditioning and cars, and thus can
learn some lessons from the past. The closed floor plan, especially the
closed kitchen, can help save energy by the simple principle of not
heating and cooling rooms that are not currently in use, as well as by
isolating rooms we want to keep warm or cool.
As cultures of consumption change and people become more
environmentally conscious, homes must change to reflect this. Designing
homes around “entertaining” that happens only a handful of times a year
is a wasteful, yet still mindbogglingly popular practice. When people
come to visit, they are there to see you, not your open concept.
It may not be as glamorous, but the closed kitchen is actually more
efficient for cooking than the sprawling, open “chef’s kitchens” that
are so popular. It enables whoever does the cooking to take fewer steps
to perform tasks. The chef’s kitchen follows the wasteful logic of the
1920s: Instead of moving the sink closer to the stove, builders install a
pot filler or a second sink in a center island. Instead of closing in
the main kitchen to isolate the disorder of food preparation, developers
are building “mess kitchens” for this purpose.
The “labor-saving” elements of open floor plans are in some ways
labor-creating. A large, single, continuous space is harder to get and
keep clean. Messes and smells are no longer isolated, but can be easily
tracked throughout the entire first floor of a large home. Less house in
general means less house to clean.
Not separating cooking, living, and dining is also an acoustical
nightmare, especially in today’s style of interior design, which avoids
carpet, curtains, and other soft goods that absorb sound. This is
especially true of homes that do not have separate formal living and
dining spaces but one single continuous space. Nothing is more maddening
than trying to read or watch television in the tall-ceilinged living
room with someone banging pots and pans or using the food processor 10
feet away in the open kitchen.
Instead of these—space-wasting, specialized rooms that are used
relatively sparingly—why not just build common rooms with walls and
doors? If you want to escape something unpleasant, you can do so without
feeling banished or isolating yourself from everyone else. Sometimes,
true freedom means putting up a few barriers.
Kate Wagner is an architecture and design critic based in Baltimore. She is the author of the architecture blog McMansion Hell.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-case-for-rooms?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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