Sales of homes in Langley are up compared to last year – but the kind of home selling has changed.
The sale of houses in Langley dropped off sharply in this fall, while townhouse and condo sales surged, according to statistics released by the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board.
In October, 87 detached houses changed hands in Langley, down 33.6 per cent compared to the 131 houses sold in the same month in 2015.
However, that was offset by changes in the townhouse market, where 79 homes sold compared to 53 in the same month in 2015, and in condos, where 75 sold compared to 43 a year ago.
In total, 241 houses, townhouses, and condos changed hands in Langley in October this year, compared to 227 in the same month in 2015.
Langley real estate agent Angela Evenett said she believes the main cause was the spiking cost of the detached home over the past year.
The benchmark price of a detached house in Langley was $881,600 in October, up 35.8 per cent from a year earlier.
For years, condo and townhouse prices have remained more-or-less flat.
In the last year, they’ve started increasing as people turned to them as an alternative.
“We’ve never seen strata go up like it has in the last year,” said Evenett. “It’s been flat for so long because value is typically in the land.”
Townhouse prices have risen 36.7 per cent, while condo prices are up 27.7 per cent in Langley.
But house prices got so high they left behind families looking to buy their first home, sending them to townhouses. Evenett said the larger townhouses are now routinely selling for up to half a million dollars.
Condo sales in Langley are up almost 75 per cent in the last year, she said.
Adding to the high prices there were changes to mortgage rules and the imposition of the foreign buyers tax on Metro Vancouver, Evenett said. All of them might have had an impact that started to slow down sales of detached homes.
Evenett said she is seeing some clients who are holding back from purchases right now, waiting to see if prices will come down in the near future.
There will always be buyers and sellers for houses, townhouses, and condos, she said.
Langley was part of a broader trend across Surrey, Abbotsford, and other parts of the Lower Mainland.