Ep 21: Guelph real estate weekly sales update Sept 1-15, 2025

Ryan reviews the Guelph real estate market sales for the period of Sept 1- 15, 2025. You can always real the full Guelph real estate update on our website at https://bethandryan.ca

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 and welcome back to the Guelph Real Estate Report Podcast. This is episode number 21 and my name is Ryan Waller and I work in Guelph Real Estate with my wife Beth. And today we are going to talk about the first few weeks into September. It is a summary of my full blog that I write every two weeks giving updates on the market. You can find it on our website at. Beth and Ryan aka there are a few interesting things in the first two weeks of September that have caught me by surprise, and I'm going to take you through them today. We always say that September is the second spring because after some time off in the summer, July and August volumes are typically down. People are out traveling out on vacation with their families, and they are not looking at real estate. In September, when the kids get back in school, when people get back to their regular routines. The house hunt starts again, and people who were waiting until summer vacations were over are starting to get serious about moving. People who were prepping their house waited through August, when it was slow to put their house on the market in September. And so the period between Labor Day and Thanksgiving generally gets a seasonal bump. This is also because people want to sell in September or October and have a 60 ish day closing, so that they can be all moved in before Christmas. Before we get into the numbers for September, there are a few things worth talking about. One of them being that this week on September 17th, the Government of Canada reduced the overnight rate to 2.5%, which is a reduction of 25 basis points. So anyone who has a variable rate mortgage is paying less. The rate went down. Variable rate mortgage, home equity line of credit. Um, some car loans, other other things that follow a variable rate have become cheaper as a result. And there is anticipation that there is going to be at least one more this year, probably October and probably one in the spring. So if you do have a variable rate mortgage, probably looking at another point five. Break on your payments, and it does add up for every $500,000 in mortgage every time the government reduces. 0.25%. It's the savings of about 100 bucks a month. So if you have a home equity line of credit and you have a mortgage, you're probably saving could be 100 bucks. 200 bucks. Depends, I guess, obviously on what you have outstanding. But there are some savings to be had. So good. That's good news. Now this doesn't impact fixed rate mortgages at all. They are a fixed rate and they follow the bond market. So, um, I was just talking to a mortgage broker who said that probably right now variable might be the best thing in the short term. Um, depending on your situation, a fixed or a variable could work for you. But he was insinuating that a variable rate mortgage might be the best way to go. What happens generally when interest rates come down like this is not much because most people are anticipating it. Uh, sellers like to believe that. There are a bunch of buyers waiting on the sidelines for the interest rate announcement to come out, and if it drops, the buyer suddenly start booking appointments and making offers on houses. And of course, it's not true. Buyers aren't generally going to make a move based on what the government of Canada does on the Wednesday morning of an interest rate announcement. Buyers have their own situation in mind. Most of their lenders have already factored that in when they're talking about pre-approval and that sort of thing. So there isn't this big push suddenly as soon as interest rates drop to get into the market. Generally, what happens is not a lot. Over time, there may be an increase in demand, um, but not immediately following an interest rate announcement. And of course, the reason the interest rates are coming down is not necessarily a good thing. Interest rates usually come down because the economy is not in great shape. Uh, unemployment is rising. I believe we're at 7% nationally now. There are some areas of Ontario, Windsor, Oshawa heavily reliant on automotive that are higher than the national average. There was concern, and there was a report that I talked about in one of my earlier episodes about how the area of Kitchener-Waterloo, Cambridge, Guelph, Hamilton and Brantford were highly likely to be impacted by tariffs and slowdowns in the economy. Just because we are so reliant on manufacturing and automotive and things related to the US. So I don't necessarily think that the interest rates coming down is going to spark any sort of momentum in buyers to get into the market, and we'll talk about that in just a second. Okay, so let's get into the golf real estate sales for the period of September 1st to 15th. Uh, it is a two week period. And overall we had a total of 64 sales during the period and at 64 sales for the period for the first 15 days. That puts us at 4.3 sales per day for the first half of September. That is on par with September of last year and ahead of September 2023. And I could just remember personally back in September 2023, wondering what the heck was going on because the market seemed to drop off of a cliff all of a sudden in, uh, Q4 of 2023. So really nothing notable here. We're in regular volumes. Uh, we are under five sales per day, which is traditionally the case after June. And, um, so there were a total of 64, uh, 14 of those were in the condo townhouse stacked townhouse market, which I'm going to talk about is a little bit concerning there. Uh, and then 50 were in the detached and semi-detached segment or houses without fees. And so let's get into the condos. First of the 14 that sold in the first half of September. 325,000 was the low. 1,000,050 was the high, and the overall average was about 567,000, which is a significant drop. We were hovering around 600,000 for a little while, and this is a significant drop. Now, of course, take it with a grain of salt. It's only two weeks of data, so it just could be a first two week slowdown. But it didn't start out strong, that's for sure. 567,000. It's about a 5% decrease from August which is already slow. Homes here sold at 97.7% of the last posted asking uh, it looks to be that looks to be improving a little bit. 14 of the 14 zero sold over the asking for sold at the asking, and the remaining ten sold under the asking or 71%. So key message here. Nobody is rushing out to pay more than the asking price in a condo. Why? Because there are so many of them available right now that you don't need to. You buyers have choices. They don't need to pay more than the asking. Because they could just buy a different model, a different development, a different location and still get what they want. The worrisome thing here is that we have been traditionally selling, on average, about 1.3 to 1.6 units per day in the condo segment, while the first half of September, we've sold 14 units in 15 days, 0.9 per day. So we have we are selling less than one per day in Guelph, and there are currently 235 on the market. So I mean, you can run that math. It's if you sell one a day, it's going to take 235 days to sell through the entire stock. If you sell less than one a day, you're probably getting to 250, 260 days. We're approaching we're three quarters of the way there of having a full year inventory available in the condo segment at this pace. So a bit worrisome. Um, if you own a condo or you own a townhouse right now and you bought in the last six months, probably got a great deal. It's probably going to decrease a little bit further from there, but who cares if you're not planning on selling anyways? It doesn't really matter. Just something to be aware of. And of course, if you have any questions on condos, you can always call us. Okay. And now over to the detached segment. We have 50 sales here in the first half of the month, and 360,000 was the low price. This was a freehold home I believe was on Arthur Street. Uh, required some work. Um, a detached though, uh, a long lot great value there. 360,000, 1.4 million was the high in court right west overall average was 824,000 in July. For context, this number was at 916,000. So again, it is only two weeks of September. So it's don't hang your hat on this. But if these indications are correct, we've gone from 916 in July to 824,000. This is also an average. So if expensive houses sell of a $2 million house sells in Guelph, suddenly the overall average jumps way up. So take this stuff with a grain of salt. It's not meant to, um, be overly dramatic. Um, I just want to highlight what we're seeing as trends. Homes here sold on an average of 97.1% of the last listed asking price. This number was in the 98, um, and earlier this year was getting close to 100. So we are coming down. Uh, I expect it's probably going to go a little bit further. Five of the 50 sold over the asking of over 10%, three sold at the asking, and the remaining 42 or 84% sold under the asking price. The detached segment seems to be slowing. Um, it seems to be in general, things are slowing. I can feel it. Even in our own listings. There are less showings, there are less people going through houses. And when people do go through houses, they take longer to make a decision. And oftentimes when they are making a decision of putting an offer and they load it up with conditions, they want a financing inspection financing condition, a home inspection condition. And very often in this market, a sale of property condition. And that's a whole other episode. But there are some ways to navigate these conditions. Um, and that comes down to working with an agent who can negotiate for you. It's a very important thing in today's market. Um, we have been watching the higher end segment, in Guelph. That would be anything over a million. We noticed that in June it was 31%. July was 21% and August at 19%. This segment typically has historically, in golf, been between 15 to 20% of total. So 31 in June, 21 in July, 19 in August, so far in September were in the range of 15 to 20. We are at 16%, so nothing alarming. It just we're back. It seems that we're back to, uh, traditional, uh, selling patterns. There are a lot of move up buyers that we've noticed in golf, people who are selling in the eights seven, eight, nine hundreds and moving into the 1.23 fours, um, because there is more selection than there has been and there are less buyers buying them. So. When things were out of reach a couple of years ago because you were competing, they may now be in reach for those people that are trading up. So it is something we've noticed over the last little while. That's it for this month. Um, we are going to update this again at the end of September, when we have the full month of September in. In the meantime, of course, as I mentioned, you can find this right on our website with the full details of everything that is going on in the market. Beth and I also have a video coming for Guelph today that we are going to talk about the September numbers again in video format for Guelph real estate YouTube and give us a follow or subscribe or our podcast, give it a like. And of course, you can always get in touch with us through our website where you can make an appointment or give us a call if you have any questions. If you need a value on your house, you can always call Beth and I would be happy to come by. Talk to you soon.