Ep 23: Guelph real estate weekly sales update for Oct 1-15 2025

This week, Ryan discusses the period of Oct 1-15 in the Guelph real estate market.

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

Transcript

Oct 1- 15, 2025 Guelph real estate update

Summary

 In this episode of the Guelph Real Estate Report podcast, host Ryan Waller discusses the state of the real estate market in Guelph for the month of October. So far, there have been fewer sales and a decline in average prices compared to last year. The condo market is particularly weak, with more listings and fewer sales. In the detached segment, there are fewer homes on the market, but buyers are still negotiating and paying below the listed asking price. Overall, the market is The real estate market in Canada, particularly in the province of Ontario, has slowed down but is expected to pick up again next spring. Sales over $1 million have increased to over 20% of total sales in the past few months. Despite the slower market, there are opportunities for buyers to make moves and benefit from lower prices. The next interest rate announcement in October may result in a decrease, but it is uncertain. The market is treading along at regular levels and updates can be found

 Transcription

 Welcome to the Guelph Real Estate Report podcast with your host and wealth 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 23 and I am your host, Ryan Waller, and I work in Guelph Real Estate with my wife, Beth. Yesterday in my office, I spoke to a group of realtors. I made a presentation on business planning, and I've been doing this for a number of years. And even prior to real estate, when I was in the corporate world, we had business planning every year, and like any small business, there should be an element of planning. It helps you forecast changes. It helps you forecast budgeting, it helps you forecast your marketing spending, all of these sorts of things. And one of the things I talked about in this business planning and a lot of newer five years or less agents were in the room and I spoke to them about the importance of being able to talk about the market itself. So one of the most common things as realtors we get asked is how is the market? And instead of just saying. Good, bad. Interesting. You are far better off to be able to talk intelligently about the market, and doing that involves understanding how the market works, understanding segments that are up that are down. Understanding neighborhood dynamics, understanding types of homes. Those sorts of things are important so that when someone asks about whether the market is up or down, you can talk and respond intelligently. And so that in a long winded way, is why I wanted to say thank you for tuning in to this, because we do try our best to make the information that you are hearing or reading on our blog, or seeing in our videos relevant to the local market, and make it worth your time to tune into it. We record these videos every two weeks, mid-month and end of month. And a while back, I had a realtor tell me that actually, the realtor told a lot of people that short term data really wasn't important. And it is very important. Actually, short term data helps you identify identify trends before they become true trends. It helps you get a glimpse into what may be coming, either good or bad. And if you group a bunch of short term trends together, you get a long term trend. So, um, this is why we look at it every two weeks. You shouldn't use short term data to make major decisions because it is only a slice and time, but collectively it can be important. Today we are going to talk about the October sales. So that is October 1st to 15th. And uh, there is an interesting trend forming here. It's something we've been watching and it's validated so far this month. Um, and we'll get into the unit sales for the month. Uh, what type of market? We're in dollar sales for the month. Um, segment sales. So condos and detached and then a trend we are starting to be able to validate. So firstly, what type of market are we in. We are in a balanced market which is quickly heading towards a buyer's market. This means buyers are in control. There is more than six months of inventory on the market, and it would mean that prices are coming down because buyers have more choice. They can negotiate harder and negotiate houses against each other and get a better deal. So as of October 15th, there were 571 houses on the market, and if those sell through at an average of 100 and. Ten per month. We are looking at a very weak, balanced market, still in a balanced market, but very weak. There are 260 properties in the condo and townhouse segment, 311 properties and in the detached and semi-detached segment. This is a net rise since the end of September. So overall, um, there are more condos that have come for sale, uh, on the market in the first two weeks of October. And we've actually seen less detached. So all of the gains, the net gains month to date are coming from new listings in the condo segment. Um, if we take a look at October sales in totality to figure out how we are trending versus prior October's, we are at about 4.1 sales per day, which is, I would say, in line. It's a little lighter than last year. It's better than October 2023, which was terrible. It had 3.2 sales per month, sorry, per day. And, um, it's not great, but it's not bad. So we're in a sort of a regular October. Nothing really noteworthy. Um, it is interesting that, uh, Thanksgiving was late. Uh, so we didn't really get a rush of people prior to Thanksgiving, which sometimes happens. And we moved into a sort of October month, uh, despite the fact that Thanksgiving was late. Um, what is interesting, though, um, is that we had a average price decline October so far in this month. Um, we are looking at about 787,000 as the average, and 814,000 was the average last year. So we're down in sales. We're trending down in sales for the month. We're trending down an average price for the month. Um, it actually would have been worse if it wasn't for a big sale. Big detached home that sold, which I'll talk to in a few minutes. But, um, so the average was down about 3.3% for the month. If we take a look at what's sold in golf over the first two weeks, we have 62 sales. 18 of them were in the condo townhouse segment and 44 were in a detached segment within the condos and, uh, stack towns and townhomes. We have 18 units, 335,000 was the low. Onward. Willow 839 was the high. It was a condo in the south part of Guelph. Overall here the average was 579,000. So far this month, the highest sale at 839,000 is interesting because that's not as high as we've seen in the past. Um. It could mean that sellers are becoming a little more realistic with their pricing and bringing it down a little bit to get this sale, as opposed to having it sit on the market longer. But at 579,000 as the average, we are now well below the $600,000 average that we held on to for the first half of the year. And I suspect we've been telling everybody this, that I think that it's going to go even further down. Uh, Beth and I are putting out our predictions for next year, next week, and I suspect that is going to be one of them in that we see a lot of pressure in the condo segment. So good news is, is if you're looking for a condo, the prices are moving in the direction that we anticipate. So this again, short term trend here is that it continues to come down. I suspect it's going to come down further. Um to sold over the asking zero sold at the asking. And the remaining um. That would be the remaining 16 sold under the Ask, and that's 89% of the units sold in the condo segment sold under the asking price. We still see a glut here. So with this many listings on the market, we are, um, at a pretty high number. We are at 260 in this segment. And throughout the summer we were hovering around 230 to 40. And I think what happened was when September rolled around, investors, um, who couldn't sell in the summertime came back. And I suspect they also want to get them off the books for the end of the year if they are an investor just for tax purposes. A lot of the condos that we were showing throughout the summer were vacant, which means there's obviously no one living there, not a tenant, not an owner. And the owner is taking on regular costs, utility costs, condo fees, taxes, mortgage. And every month they're just in the hole. So I suspect that as we get closer to the end of the year, there are going to be some better deals to be had in the condo segment. Um, we were looking at an average of about 0.9 or less than one sale per day in this segment so far this month, in October, we're actually have realized there's a pickup. Uh, we're at 1.2 sales per day. So moving a little bit up in terms of the trend, a little more are moving, but there's also more coming on the market. So they're sort of moving in tandem at this point. Last month we found that there were more coming on the market and there were less selling. So if you can picture that wedge, it was getting wider and wider last month. It's closing up a little bit now. If we look at the detached segment, there are 44 sales, 550,000 was the low that was in the ward. I think it was on Manitoba Street. Uh, 2,475,000 is the high that's in the Clearfield neighborhood. Overall average was 872,000. But be warned, it's an average. And that $2.4 million sale is captured in that average. And bringing the price up, if that $2.475 million home wasn't part of the sales, the average price would have dropped $40,000 to 835,000. So just be careful. Like anything that you take stats with a grain of salt. Um, the message here, from my perspective, is that the market pricing is coming down. The homes that sold sold at an average of 97.9% of the last listed asking price, meaning there's still a bit of room for negotiation. And what we're starting to realize, Beth and I were talking about this is that it seems like when a house comes on the market at a certain price, buyers almost are starting to treat that as not the real price. And they go and look at the house. They like it. But they wait and see if the seller is going to reduce it further before they decide to do anything. And if someone else decides to do something and put in an offer, then they still have the opportunity to compete, but they're not in any rush to do anything. And so that seems to be a bit of a common trend. Um, so buyers look at it. They don't budge on the first price, but they're interested and they wait and see what happens. Up to 44 homes that sold, five sold over the asking, 11% for sold at the asking, and the remaining 80% or 35 sales sold under the asking price. I wouldn't say there's too much else to report here other than it appears the average price is coming down. There are less detached homes on the market than there were just 3 or 4 weeks ago, so it's not like we're being flooded with supply in this segment. It's just that, uh, there still is a gap between sellers expectations of a sale price and buyers expectations of a purchase price. And we've had a couple of listings where the sellers have said, guys, look, we'll put it back on the market in the spring. We don't like the way this is going. And, uh, that's great. But however, that's assuming that the market is increasing by next spring. Uh, I think here in Ontario, uh, we are so used to the spring market always being the next leg up that we think that we'll just take it off the market now. And when the market improves in the spring, we'll benefit from that. And I caution people to say, if you are thinking that there's many other people that are thinking that, and then we have all the people that are also coming onto the market naturally next spring, what does that mean? It means there's a lot of inventory and a lot of inventory means lower prices. So just because it's a new year, just because it's the spring of next year doesn't necessarily mean a better outcome. Uh, the trend we're starting to notice in this segment. Um, in this segment at $1 million plus is that it is picking up again. Um, with the exception of September, which appears to be an anomaly. The prior months show that we are selling over 20% of the sales at at 1 million or or more, uh, typically, historically, this range has been between 15 and 20% of total sales. But with the last four months, excluding September, the segment has been over 20%. So it's interesting that there are people that are still picking up higher end homes, although the market's down, because I guess they believe that this segment is going to be, um, uh, better for them. And this could be because prices are down. People are using this to their advantage. 10% off of a $1.4 million home is a lot more money than 10% off of a $700,000 home. So what's happening is we're finding a lot of move up buyers. Maybe they get 10% less on their home at 700,000. So 70 grand and they're saving 140 on the purchase price. So from their perspective, it's actually a good time to be making that move. And so we've had a number of clients do that this year and uh, benefit from a slower market, especially in the, uh, the number of homes on the market over $1 million. Overall, the message is the market is moving along. It's not a strong market, it's not a weak market. We're just treading along at regular levels. There was an interest rate decrease last month, September 17th, I think it was. And there is another one coming, another announcement coming late November, I'm sorry, late October. And the anticipation from the mortgage industry and analysts is mixed on whether the rates will come down or not. It might come down 0.25%, but it could equally just stay where it is. If they don't make any decision on October 29th, the next announcement isn't until December. So we'll wait and see. A strong jobs report that came out, um, almost made many people believe it's not going to happen, but prior to that announcement, it was almost certainly going to happen. So we'll wait and see. But until next time you can find us on YouTube. You can find us on our website at Beth and Ryan, if you have any questions for us, reach out to you soon.