Over the past two days, 20% of the sales have been for list price or higher. 31% of the homes listed in the past 30 days already are sold or conditionally sold. Concern: First-time buyers are down 8% compared to last year. Are they being priced out?
A tear-down bungalow in Capitol Hill was listed two days ago for $524,900. It sold in one day for $540,000. Builders seem to have confidence in this market.
Also two days ago, a home in Elbow Park sold for list price, $1.6 million, after two days on the market.
Bob's real estate blog 
Yesterday was the third Saturday in Feb and 36 SFH were sold. Last year, on the third Sat in Feb, only 26 sales occurred. A home in Harvest Hills which was listed for $279,900 sold in one day for $295,000. A home in Aspen Woods sold for $650,000 in 3 days after being listed for $639,900.
Well, as an active investor, it’s not looking good on the oil front. Talisman laid off 90 people today, Canadian Natural resources down 19% this year; Suncor posting its first quarterly loss in several years; Voageur looking like it’s on the rocks. Cenovus swinging into the red, as did Husky. Alberta has now frozen wages and is set to post a 4 billion deficit this year on a $30/barrel price discount for oil. North Dakota is pumping frack produced light sweet from the Bakkens which is competing for North to South pipeline space. Alberta oil companies are estimated to forgo $50 billion in profit this year because of pipeline constriction. I dumped all my oil and gas stocks last month and have since watch them slowly deteriorate in value. Light sweet is down another 2.5% on the day as of writing this post (down to $95 which means Alberta is getting about $70/barrel).
My buddy, who is a real estate agent, recently purchased a house in Kincora from his cousin because he couldn’t afford the down payment. He ended up putting down $20k on a $430K place (assumable mortgage?). That would scare the hell out of me.
Anyway, I’ve been lucky (hard-working lucky) enough to be able to afford a house now without a mortgage, but I’m going to keep renting throughout 2013, at least until my lease is up. The investor in me doesn’t look the lay of the land. One more bad quarter from some of these oil companies and you may see a few more people looking for work. That’s never good for house prices. We’ll see over the next few months.
Comment from a Herald reader on the hyper-active Calgary market “…But, we had 6 offers within an hour of it hitting the system, all above the asking price, which I think does reflect somewhat on the bigger picture.
That said, I feel a huge amount of relief in knowing I don’t have to worry about a price correction that seems somewhat imminent.”
Read more http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/real-estate/Calgary+area+average+house+prices+jump+over+years/7995777/story.html
Man this market stresses me out to no end. I’m in my early 30’s with a young family. Between my wife and I, we make above the average household income and have about 70k to put down on a house and although the bank would give us the cash, don’t feel that we could responsibly afford the average priced house in this town. We are just in a furnished rental while we are looking for a place and are not having alot of fun. I worry that if the market were to go south all of our equity could be wiped out in short order. The rental market is very tight and expensive at the moment too, so I’m not at all eager to be competing in that market either. What to do, what to do…………..