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By Curtis Galbraith

Real Estate Business

Real estate association chair expecting increase in home prices in 2025

Jan 17, 2025 | 6:00 AM

The chair of the Grande Prairie & Area Association of Realtors says he is expecting an increase for home sales and prices this year.

Sean Gillis believes this “creates confidence among the consumer.”

“Now, the only thing holding us back from volume sales is the lack of inventory. So, as we start to see consumer confidence and stabilization in the interest rates, I think what I see from past experience, we’ll see an increase in sales throughout 2025.”

Gillis says interest rates stabilizing also leads to consumer confidence.

He adds all these factors lead to a couple of things.

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“Exisiting home owners find an equity position, which allows them to upgrade for more space, features, whether they’re downsizing, looking at acreages or vice-versa, just as some examples.”

“Secondly, due to the stress test and the way that we qualify for mortgages, the correction in interest rates, or stabilization in interest rates, allows affordability.”

Gillis says the last time he saw a market like this was in 2014, a year which he says sales volume peaked.

He adds at that time, the average home price was $351,000. It is now $388,000.

“The nice thing about the market we’re going into later in 2025 is we’re starting to see activation in the multi-family (area), condos, developers looking at apartment buildings and multi-family projects, which we haven’t (seen) in quite some time.”

Gillis says more of this will open up as rising prices catch up to the cost of building.

He adds what he calls “the hottest market” at this time is single family duplexes and town houses listed at less than $500,000. There has also been an increase in condo sales.

As for addressing low inventory of homes, Gillis says people in the industry have been looking at ways to build more affordable housing “for quite some time, so that’s one part of it.”

“Repurposing certain lands and/or buildings to create living spaces and multi-family out of it, which will create more opportunity on the bottom end.”

Gillis says in 2024, there were 1,401 total home sales in the City and County of Grande Prairie combined. That compares to 1,373 in 2023, 1,462 in 2022, and 1,611 in 2021.

He says the lower sales number in 2024 was due of a lack of homes on the market.

“A stable market would be three to six months of inventory, and we have less than a month of inventory on the market currently.”

Gillis expects more homes to become available in the spring and summer.

He adds having a proper plan in place for anyone buying is important. The first step in that is qualifying for a mortgage. After that comes figuring out what home features like location and number of bedrooms people would need.