The Fraser Valley housing market in 12 charts — September 2024

Apartment prices in Chilliwack and Abbotsford have nearly reached parity, as the discount for living in the eastern valley seemingly disappears for at least one type of housing.

Abbotsford apartment prices haven’t budged for years—and have actually declined since the spring—while those in Chilliwack have risen steadily over the last 12 months.

The result is that a typical two-bedroom apartment (as defined by the two real estate boards that publish real estate statistics) now costs nearly the same price in each city. A year ago, the benchmark price for apartments in Abbotsford was $20,000 higher than those in Chilliwack. Today, that gap is just $3,000.

You can find details on that change, and more, in our monthly look at the Fraser Valley’s housing market. We have compiled a dozen different custom charts to give readers a sense of prices in four different communities and three different home types.

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.

Although detached home and townhouse prices rebounded in Langley in August, prices across much of the valley declined. The biggest shifts could be seen in detached homes and apartment prices in Chilliwack, where the two types of housing continued to head in opposite directions. Since April, the benchmark price for apartments in Chilliwack has risen by $24,000, while the benchmark for detached homes have dropped by about $50,000. Prices in other communities continue to bounce around, with no clear direction.

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 a useful tool.

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’s detached home sector has shown signs of increasing prices, while the apartment sector has headed in the opposite direction. In Abbotsford, single-family and townhome prices remain slightly above where they were last year, but are showing significant signs of slippage. There are signs that buyers are favouring cheaper options. Similar trends can be seen in Mission, though apartment prices have been increasing. And in Chilliwack, as we have noted, prices for apartments and detached home are heading in opposite directions.

Supply and demand

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.

The pricing trends align with sales figures across the Fraser Valley.

New listings continue to leave Langley, Abbotsford, and Mission with broadly more homes up for sale, compared to demand, than last year.

In Chilliwack, meanwhile, an uptick of sales suggests healthy demand for new homes, particularly apartments.