Ep 12: Guelph real estate weekly sales update April 1-10, 2025

This week, Ryan discusses a variety of topics related to Guelph real estate including:

- Q1 2025 sales results are in: down vs 2024

- April 2025 sales off to a decent start w/ 57 sales (5.2 sales/day)

- Look into emerging trends

More at Beth and Ryan's Guelph real estate blog

You can always get touch with Beth and Ryan Waller on their website

Transcript

Welcome to the Guelph Real Estate Report podcast with your host and Guelph realtor, Ryan Waller. This podcast is designed to provide information for those buying and selling homes in the Guelph area to make the process more informative, fun, and a little less stressful. Now on with the show! 

Hey everyone, it's Ryan and thanks for tuning in to episode 12 of the Guelph Real Estate Report podcast. It has been a busy spring, so I apologize that this is a little bit later than usual, but buyers are out and sellers are out, and we're going to talk about that today. For those of you interested, there is also a video version of this on our YouTube channel, and there is a blog post that gives a little more in-depth detail that we post on our website bethandryan.ca. Now, with Q1 behind us, I think it's probably one for the record books. Um, January, February and March were unusually slow in terms of transactions and wealth real estate. It doesn't necessarily mean that prices declined, but activity as a whole was coming to a grinding halt. And by the time probably mid February rolled around and it continued through March as well. 

Overall, the quarter was down 20% in dollar volume. That's the sale price. If you add up all home sales together, unit volume was down about the same amount and the average price was down about 10% as well. However, if you take a look at the overall percentage of sales that the first quarter typically represents, it's a much smaller number than Q2 or Q3. I think the key message for the first quarter was that people are on edge. There are concerns with the US tariffs that may or may not ever eventually come here. Employees are nervous about their jobs. The economy is nervous about employment because they continue to bring down interest rates. And as a whole, this general nervousness has caused people to hunker down and not do much of anything at all. 

And as we move into mid-April and it almost feels like this tariff threat that was at highs in March has sort of subsided for the time being. And it looks like those people that were in February and March on the sidelines have started to come out with the spring market. I love to talk about the number of sales per day as a gauge of how the market is moving. And in March it was high threes, low fours per day, where in a typical March we see about five sales per day. Now that we move into April, up until April 10th, we had just over five sales per day, which is more in line with the typical spring market. 

And although it is slightly lower than the past few years, specifics are on our blog, on our website. We're in the range. We're getting a lot closer than we have been in the past few months, which makes me believe that the real estate market is picking up. Transactions are starting to happen again, and people are feeling a little more comfortable with the slightly warmer weather. In the first ten days of April, we've had a total of 57 sales. 

That number keeps changing slightly, but there are a total of 57 sales that were captured in the first ten days of April, and this translates into 33 detached and semi-detached homes and the remainder in the condo segment. We're going to talk a little bit more about each of these segments because as we've talked about before, it really is a story of two different markets. So first taking a look at the detached and semi-detached segment. Uh, there were 33 units sold, as mentioned. And of that the low price was 538,000. Uh, the high price was 2,000,060. And an interesting thing that we talked about a little bit on our blog is that this segment above $1 million, especially in detached homes, is really something to keep an eye on because it is now 19% of the sales above $1 million in 2025. And typically when we watch that, it's anywhere between 10 to 20%. So we're still within the range, but we're at the high end of the range. And in particular houses above $1.7 million in Guelph, which kind of seems crazy. 

There have been a number of them this year. There are six of them so far this year and three above $2 million, which is also a very interesting segment, uh, in Guelph for sure. And of the 33 that have sold so far this month, we're looking at an average price of 9.99. A slight decrease from the previous period. Uh, how is this here selling at about 99% of the asking price? And. This is different than condos, which I'll get into in a minute. But the point being here is that in most cases in the detached and semi-detached segment, houses are going near the asking price. If a seller's asking $900,000, as long as it's justified by comparables, they're getting close to that. Buyers are willing to pay it as long as it's a reasonable price. So far this month, 13% sorry, 13 of the 33 or 39% have sold over the asking price, which is a big number. None have sold at the asking and 20 have sold under the asking, which is 61%. The stronghold in this segment continues to be detached homes in and around the downtown core. So this is up to about $900,000 is really still competitive because there are no new supply of these houses, of course, because they are in a highly. Dense area where there's just not a lot of new development. There are some infill projects that are happening in certain neighborhoods, like Old University or the Ward, but generally what you see is what you get in detached homes under 900,000, in the downtown core. So if you want one of these, chances are you're going to be competing with someone else who does, as long as it's priced appropriately. Looking at the condo segment, we have 25 units that have sold here, with 307,000 being the low and 1.3 million being the high. It's unusual to find a condo to sell over 1.3 million. I believe there have only been three so far this year in the condo market. Um, but yeah, it there there have been, uh, a couple of high ones. 

The overall average in this segment was 626,000, which is slightly up versus the last period. Homes here are selling at about 97% of the asking. And this is simply what they were last asking versus what they got. And the lower the number obviously, uh, which means it means there's more room to negotiate. So if, uh, we are 97% of the asking, there is 3% wiggle room on negotiations. That seems to be happening in the market. Four of the units sold over the asking that 16% to sold at the asking 8% and 19 of the 25 sold under the asking, which is 76%. This segment continues to have a lot of inventory. It doesn't move as quick, and there's a lot of new development that is either happening or coming to completion. And in many cases, they're just not moving as quick. There's just a lot of supply and less demand. So if you are buying in this segment, the great news for you is that you can negotiate. It doesn't mean that you can lowball houses and get the best, lowest ever price, but it does mean that sellers are going to have to be a little more open to negotiating and reacting to the market. So where a stacked townhouse would have been $700,000 last year, that same unit is now sitting at 650. Doesn't mean you can get it at 600. Probably not, but the options are getting better for you. I'm curious to see what happens in the remainder of April. It's looking like a pretty brisk, active fluid market out there. So I will keep you posted on what's going on next week, but I would guess that April and May are going to be regular spring months in the real estate market and May in particular, which is statistically the highest volume month. The most transactions happen in May. I anticipate we're going to be in line with previous years there. If you have any questions on the Guelph real estate market, you can always go to our website, book an appointment, call us, email us. We're accessible. Talk to you soon.