The Fraser Valley housing market in 13 charts — November, 2024

The fall of 2024 has seen home prices tick upwards across the Fraser Valley—though only marginally. Across the region, home values remain largely unchanged from a year ago, with prices still bouncing around even as more homes hit the market and are sold.

For our ongoing (and evolving) monthly look at the Fraser Valley’s housing market, we’ve compiled 13 different custom charts to give readers a sense of prices in four different communities and among three different home types. This feature is a recurring segment in The Current, but the charts are still a work in progress, so let us know what other data you might like to see.

At the bottom of the story, we’ve added a new feature: a listing the most-expensive home for sale we could find in each community.

If you want the raw data you can find it here: Fraser Valley Real Estate Board | Chilliwack and District Real Estate Board.

Benchmark prices for typical homes

The “benchmark price” reflects the going rate for a “typical” detached house, townhome, or apartment, as defined by each real estate board. This is an attempt to create an apples-to-apples price comparison. You can see how the Chilliwack real estate board describes its benchmark detached house here.

Benchmark prices for single-family homes had been broadly declining across the Fraser Valley until November, when they began to take tentative steps in the other direction. Townhouse prices also bounced back a bit but continue to tread water, while apartment values remain unsteady.

The benchmark prices of apartments in Chilliwack has now fallen about 6% over the last three months. And in Langley, benchmark single-family and townhome prices rose after consecutive months of decline. No place, however has seen benchmark prices shift by more than 4% over the last year, as we’ll see in the next set of charts.

City-by-city

Benchmark prices can be relatively slow to adjust to changes in the market, so other measures, including the median and average prices of homes, can be useful.

The median is the price of the detached home/apartment/townhome that is in the middle of the month’s tally—half the homes sold were more expensive and half were less expensive. The “average” is a simple mean, where you add all the prices together and divide them by the number of houses.

Both measures can provide broad and early indications about the status of the housing market, but they can also can be distorted by the composition of the homes sold in a given month. If an abnormally large number of older (or newer) homes sell in a particular month, that can cause both numbers to change, even if house prices as a whole are static. But that flaw can also be an asset: those figures also suggest when buyers are seeking out homes in certain price ranges. That, in turn, can impact prices as a whole.

For the general trend, we’ve focused on benchmark prices.

Home prices in the Fraser Valley tend to follow those of communities closer to Vancouver, and values there have been treading water for more than a year now, bouncing up and down, but not moving much. Some signs of increased demand have begun pushing underlying numbers up, though more time will be needed to know if buyers are becoming more willing to spend more.

Mission has seen the clearest upward trend in recent months across all property classes. In Chilliwack, meanwhile, a clear decline can be seen in apartment prices, where the numbers suggest cheaper units have been selling much more quickly than newer, more-expensive ones.

Sales and listings

November saw a continued uptick in completed sales, compared to the previous year. Activity was up roughly 30% across the region compared to the previous year.

The increased sales are only partly the result of more homes being listed for sale.

Although listings have also increased compared to last year, sales have jumped even more, suggesting greater demand for homes. If that holds, it could put long-term upward pressure on prices. (Declining interest rates may be playing a role.)

While data above suggests prices for apartments in Chilliwack are declining, the figures suggests there’s no shortage of demand for units in the city, with nearly as many sales in November as new listings.

The charts below compare the number of new listings to the number of sales in each communities. The larger the pale-green slice of the pie, the more competition there is for each type of home. 

We’ve added a percentage figure that puts a number on the ratio between sales and new listings. The pie chart is a visual indicator of the percentage (If the number is 50%, the ‘sales’ slice of the pie is exactly half as large as the ‘new listings’ slice; it will not be half of the entire pie). A higher sales-to-new listing ratio reflects broadly higher competition for homes, and vice versa.

Most-expensive homes for sale

Langley

$23.8 million: A 28-acre Glen Valley mansion built to resemble a European chateau has a reflecting pool, a swimming pool, a dungeon-like wine room, a massive expanse of grass, and a building for all the lawn-mowers you or, more likely, your gardener will need to cut your lawn.

Abbotsford

$12.5 million: This 24-acre farm property on Downes Road, just north of central Abbotsford, comes with an “older home with swimming pool” but the price mostly reflects the fact that the parcel isn’t located in the Agriculture Land Reserve and thus has the potential for future development.

Mission

$7.4 million: This Gunn Avenue home has six beds and was built less than 10 years ago, but it costs so much because the 5.6-acre lot is located in an area slated for development by the City of Mission’s Silverdale plan.

Chilliwack and eastern valley

$6 million: This 17,000-square-foot home on a 29-acre Upper Prairie Road property has 11 bedrooms and even more bathrooms. The house is larger than would be permitted on agricultural land today, and the property comes with a second, five-bedroom house. The listing says a barn on the property has been converted into a “repair shop” that can house two large trucks and their trailers.