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

Although recent interest rate cuts have led realtors to herald the return of ‘healthy’ numbers of home sales, prices in the Fraser Valley continue to tread water.

For our ongoing (and evolving) monthly look at the Fraser Valley’s housing market, we’ve compiled a dozen 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.

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 have been declining for months across most of the Fraser Valley. Since August, the value of a typical detached house has dropped by more than $30,000 in Langley and close to that amount in Abbotsford. Chilliwack has also recorded three months of declining prices. In Chilliwack, detached home prices are down more than $50,000 over the last six months. Prices are approximately what they were at the start of 2022.

Townhome and apartment prices haven’t dropped nearly as much. In fact, while the benchmark price of detached homes has dropped 7.1% in Chilliwack, the benchmark prices of the typical apartment has increased by 18.5%. In Langley detached prices are up 11.5%, but apartment values have increased by 20.1% (Although benchmark prices are supposed to be a means to compare the value of the same “typical” home over time, it’s possible for changes to the definition of “typical” to impact trends.)

Over the last 12 months, Mission has recorded the highest increase in benchmark apartment values and the second largest increase in townhome prices (behind Abbotsford) in the region served by the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board. That region includes Surrey, North Delta, Langley, Abbotsford and Mission.

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.

Langley has seen an across-the-board drop in the sale price of homes. The significantly lower median and average prices suggest buyers are preferring older, smaller, and cheaper houses. Townhome prices are also consistently lower.

In Abbotsford and Mission, the trend is more mixed. In Chilliwack, meanwhile, significantly higher median and average apartment prices reflects the large number of new condos that have been built and bought in the past year.

Sales

This is a new chart for November. It shows the sales activity in the last month, compared to a year prior. Because of seasonal fluctuations, comparing sales volumes between months is unreliable.

October saw a significant increase in sales activity compared to the same month last year. The board of the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board attributed the increased activity to recent cuts to the interest rate. Often, increased sales reflects higher demand—and potentially higher prices in the near future.

Sales and listings

These charts 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.

As sales have significantly increased, so too has demand in many areas. That increased inventory explains why the higher sales activity hasn’t yet pushed home prices up in many areas.