The city of Kamloops is situated right between the North and South Thompson Rivers, in Canada’s most western province, British Columbia. Home to just shy of 100,000 people, Kamloops is British Columbia’s seventh-largest city.
In recent years, Kamloops has become a desired place to live by many home-seekers from within and outside of the province. It has a particularly warm climate with over 2,000 hours of sunshine annually! Combine that with a unique mix of landscapes and a vast array of topography to suit any outdoor adventure enthusiast, it’s easy to understand the lure to this dynamic community.
Kamloops is also home to Thompson River University and many highly rated secondary and elementary schools, making it an ideal place to raise a family, start a career or retire. If you’re considering making a move, here’s how the Kamloops real estate market has fared over the past year, and whether or not we can expect this red-hot activity to continue in 2022.
Kamloops Real Estate Still Going Strong
Like much of Canada, the Kamloops real estate market has skyrocketed to new heights since mid-2020. While the numbers may not be as staggering as they were at the peak of the real estate boom in 2020, the city is still pulling strong sales numbers that outpace the typical average.
In September 2021, the MLS System of the Kamloops & District Real Estate Board recorded sales of 305 residential units. While this is 11.6 per cent lower than last September when a new record was set, it is still seven per cent above the five-year average and 20.3 per cent above the 10-year average for the month of September, proving that the Kamloops real estate is still on fire. “Home sales picked back up in September, coming in just six sales shy of tying for the second-highest level for this month on record,” said Chelsea Mann, President of the Kamloops & District Real Estate Board.
While the monthly sales for September were below the numbers from a year ago, 2021 year-to-date sales have greatly outpaced the first nine months of 2020. As of September 30, home sales in 2021 totalled 3,003 units – a new record! This is also a substantial, 37.9 per-cent increase over the same period in 2020.
With such a high volume of home sales this year, it is important that new listings regularly come on the market to replenish and keep this local market in balance. Throughout the last year, new listings have fallen short of sales, substantially tightening the market.
In September 2021, just 386 new residential listings came on stream. This is a slight decline of 3.7 per cent, compared to September 2020, but more than three per cent over the five- and 10-year averages for the month of September. While this is above typical values, the real story here though is how these numbers do not match up to the numbers of homes sold, depleting the inventory and causes housing prices in the area to climb higher.
In fact, active residential listings at the end of September 2021 totalled only 671 units, down 34.9 per cent year-over-year, marking the lowest number of active listings in September since the 1990s. In addition, the months of inventory this past September came in at just 2.2 months – well below the typical seven months it would take to liquidate supply at the current pace of sales, during the month of September. Mann adds, “an above-average level of new listings coming onto the market in September was a welcome sight and managed to slow the decline in overall inventories. Although the market is nowhere near as tight as it was during the first half of the year, we are still very much in seller’s territory and price gains remain strong as ever, so we hope to continue to see a healthy influx of new supply returning to the market.”
Falling inventory and steadily high unit sales have prompted price increasing across the Kamloops real estate market. At the end of September, the MLS Home Price Index (HPI) composite benchmark price was 23.4 per cent higher than it was at the same time last year, coming in at $552,900.
As we slide deeper into the fall season, unit sales in the Kamloops housing market are expected to continue at a steady pace to round out 2021. There are hopes that more homes will come on the market and alleviate some of the upward price pressure in the area. If you are in the market to sell your home in Kamloops, take advantage of these seller’s market conditions. Once 2022 rolls around and if an interest-rate hike materializes, there could be a shift in this BC Interior market.
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