Real estate prices make huge jump in Okanagan

The benchmark price for a single-family house in the Central Okanagan jumped more than $53,000 to $829,400 in March from $776,300 the month before.

That’s also a 23.4 per cent increase over March of 2020, which was a time when housing sales dropped dramatically because of COVID-19. Still, prices have been on a tear in the region for months now.

“With economic recovery underway, low mortgage rates and the persistent pandemic effect of buyers looking for more space, it’s no surprise that local real estate is still seeing a boom,” Association of Interior Realtors president Kim Heizmann said in a news release. “While the pandemic has increased demand it also created a huge shock to the supply side of things that will take a long time to get back to a healthy inventory level.”

The association uses a benchmark price rather than an average price in order to depict the price of a typical house sold in the region. That tool is used for the Central and North Okanagan regions but has yet to be implemented in the South Okanagan after the Okanagan Valley’s two real estate board merged in January.

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The North Okanagan saw an increase of about $30,000 to $590,700 in March from $561,500 the month before in its benchmark price.

The average price in Penticton for a single-family house rose more than $41,000 in the last month to $803,994 from $762,587.

Less dramatic in some regions were increases to condo prices. They only went up about $11,000 in the Central Okanagan to $425,300 and increased $7,500 to $270,400 in the North Okanagan. Both are benchmark prices.

In the South Okanagan, the pattern was different with the average condo price jumping $63,500 to $394,313.

As pointed out by Heizmann, this price surge has been triggered, in part, by a dramatic decline in property listings which are down more than 50 per cent for single-family homes in all Okanagan regions as compared to 2020.

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