After a sharp upswing in new listings the freehold market slowed slightly. It recorded a 6% drop last week while sales decreased by 37%. Normally we would sound the alarm bells over a decline like this but we believe this is solely a function of a shorter work week. Multiple offers are still de rigueur as nearly 60% of freehold homes sold in a bidding war. Open house traffic on the Saturday of the long weekend was still hopping but not nearly as much as the previous week. It is safe to say that this is not a trend, merely a brief respite from the usual hot market. If there was one other interesting note from last week it would have to be the significant increase in high end homes coming to market. Over the last few months we only saw between 35 and 45 new listings of homes over $3m, while last week that number spiked to over 60, bringing the total number of high end listings in the core to 134. Our research indicates that this continues to be the slowest moving sector of the market.

Who doesn’t like to cheer for the underdog? In this context we’re speaking about the condominium market. After more than a year of “Turner-isms” (we are referring to The Greater Fool himself), the condo market refuses to die. Each week we seem to deduce more good news from this well chastised real estate segment. Last week new listings backed off by 8%. Sure, that might not be a significant number when we are talking about 700 units, but sales were the same as the previous week and multiple offer sales reached their highest levels in more than a year by hitting 29%. Wow.