December home sales up 22.7% from a year ago, CREA report finds

The Canadian Real Estate Association says home sales in December were up 22.7 per cent compared with a year ago when sales were relatively quiet.

The association says sales in the final month of 2019 were up compared with a year ago earlier across most of Canada, including all of the largest urban markets.

On a month-over-month basis, home sales in December were down 0.9 per cent.

The decline ended a streak of monthly gains that began last March.

The actual national average price for a home sold in December 2019 was about $517,000, up 9.6 per cent compared with a year earlier.

Excluding the Greater Vancouver and Greater Toronto Area, two of the country's most expensive and active housing markets, the average price of a home sold was about $400,000, up 6.7 per cent compared with December 2018.

The obvious follow-through from this increasingly tight market is that prices are starting to respond," saidDouglas Porter, chief economist for BMO Economics.

"The MLS Home Price Index, which adjusts for shifts in the types of homes purchased, rose 3.3 per centyear over year. While that seems mild, it's a big pick-up from the outright declines reported in the first half of the year and is now running at its fastest pace in almost two years."