What’s happening in real estate this week?

BY SCOTT MOORE, REALTOR

This blog post was prompted by a client calling me to say that they thought their search might have been broken as it had been a while since it had pulled any hits.

They have a pretty broad search — bungalows in south Winnipeg for $500k — so it didn’t make sense that there wouldn’t have been a single listing come to market. I started digging into it to see what was going on, and sure enough the search wasn’t broken, it was just that there was nothing listed that fit the bill for them since November 25th!!

Point being, December in Winnipeg’s real estate market is pretty slow.

Insider secret, this is one of the best things about this career. I love that business settles down at the exact time that we want it to settle down. We can relax, reset for the new year, and be with our families and the holiday season. It’s perfect.

Despite the slowness of the December real estate market, we did have huge news in the real estate world this week. The Bank of Canada dropped interest rates another half a percent on Dec 11th, bringing the overnight rate to 3.25% (from 5% in early June).

This is expected to be the end of the huge drops. We will probably see another 0.25% drop at the next announcement in January, but with the Canadian dollar at about 0.68 vs the US dollar, there won’t be much room to move too much further.

One more big change coming up on Dec 15th is that Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) is raising the upper limit on insured mortgages from $1M to $1.5M, which brings the minimum down payment required for mortgages at that price point from 20% to as low as 5%.   

All these changes mean that we are expecting a very busy spring in real estate. If you have it in the back of your mind that you might want to make some moves in real estate in 2025, the last few weeks of December are a great time for a phone call just to chat through options and make a loose game plan for the new year.

If you’d like to do that, my phone is still on 24/7, and my number is 204 995 7355.