Canada's Home Prices Are Soaring & It's Mostly The GTA's Fault

The price of the average Canadian home reached new heights in 2022, a rise that experts say can largely be attributed to the country's most expensive housing markets.

According to the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) report, national home sales stayed record-breakingly high in January 2022 despite "low levels of both new and end-of-month supplies of properties for sale."

The spike put the national average home price at a record of $748,450 last January, a 21% increase from the same month the previous year.

However, CREA states that the country's national average price is directly linked to its most active and expensive housing markets.

"The national average price is heavily influenced by sales in Greater Vancouver and the GTA, two of Canada's most active and expensive housing markets," the report states. "Excluding these two markets from the calculation in January 2022 cuts almost $160,000 from the national average price."

It's also worth noting that Canada's number of newly listed homes dropped by 11% from December 2021 to January 2022. This statistic was primarily caused by "a pullback in the GTA accounting for more than half of the national decline."

As for hopes of prices dropping, well, it'll all depend on how many people jump back into the market in 2022.

"The ideal situation between now and the summer would be that a huge surge of sellers come forward looking to sell in the spring 2022 market," Shaun Cathcart, CREA's Senior Economist, says.

"If that were to occur, similar to 2021, we'd likely see a massive number of sales take place, which would get a lot of frustrated buyers into homeownership, and we'd likely see some cooling off on the price growth side," Cathcart adds.