Calgary Real Estate Market Update - 2024 Review and 2025 Predictions

So my new favorite thing is finding stats that nobody else is talking about. Well, and today I've definitely got some of those stats I'm gonna share with you. We're gonna talk a lot about 2024. We're also gonna talk about what could happen in 2025. We're gonna talk about the news that is going on in our city around real estate. What is happening? How our team is doing? I am so excited. This is 2025, January's real estate market update. Now, I don't know about you, but during this season of Christmas and New Year's, it is so good to look backwards and see how far we have come. Not just in real estate stats and numbers, but also for our team. What has our team accomplished here at the Chamberlain Real Estate Group? Every 25 hours in 2024, we helped a family transition, whether that was buying or selling. That was a possession every 25 hours in 2024. Now, our marketing has been seen all over the world. So much so that nearly 530,000 people have come to our website this year alone from all over the world. So when we are working with clients and sellers and buyers, our marketing is being seen everywhere. And on YouTube, we had 1,156,717 views. That is amazing. Like, it just makes my heart so happy because I love creating this content and I'm just so glad to be able to do this and you are able to watch it. So thank you for watching our stuff and being a part of that. And if we can help in any way, please let us know because that number, 1,156,717 video views translates to 132 video views every single hour in 2024. Better yet, that's 2.2 video views every single minute of every single day in 2024. That is shocking. Thank you so much. Thank you for working with our team and trusting myself, trusting our team in making some of the biggest decisions of your life, right? Buying and selling, it's some of the biggest decisions that we make. So thank you for that. And let's look at the data. Let's see what the data has said and see how far we've come with Calgary real estate. What a year we've had, right? I mean, we've seen some pretty big growth in values, benchmark prices. We've seen a lot more inventory coming to our market. We've seen kind of some shifts in sales, right? But here's what is actually happening in our city. So when you look at our chart, this is the first inventory sales and benchmark prices. The green line is benchmark prices. Blue is the current inventory numbers and red down here is the sales that have happened. So since I think it's June, right around here, we have seen prices decrease, but we've still seen a year over year increase. So prices have been sliding a little bit, but it's nothing like we haven't seen before. Benchmark price at the end of 2024 was $583,300. That is still up from $570,000 as of December, 2023. So we still had $13,000 increase over the benchmark price year over year. Now, if you actually take a look and break this out into the quadrants of the city, every single quadrant has seen an increase, including city center. They were the lowest at 0.2% increase year over year. And I believe the East was the highest at 9%, followed by the West at 7.1% and then everything else kind of in between. Now, if you look at Calgary, like the surrounding areas, everything also still has seen a year over year increase. All the way down in High River, we saw a 7.5%, Okotoksaw 10.3, Calgary overall saw 7.2, Strathmore was 8.6, Chestermere 10%, Airdrie 5, Cochrane 6, and Canmore 7%. So all of these areas still have seen an increase, even though our market has slowed down a little bit. Are we gonna see this further on into this year? Like, is that slowdown gonna keep on going? My gut is no, I'll get to the predictions later, but my gut is no. So what we ended up having for new listings, it really, really dropped, but it's right in the wheelhouse of what happens in December. So much so that we saw 1,239 new listings in December for Calgary and December, 2023, well, it was pretty much the same at 1248. So we are right in the same wheelhouse of new listings as we saw last year. Now, when it comes to number of sales, in December, 2024, we saw 1,322 sales. Now, last year in December, it was 1,366. So again, it's pretty much the same in terms of the number of sales that happened. There is something that's different, and that's like off-market properties, and I'm gonna get into that in a moment, but I wanna talk about the inventory. This is exactly what I predicted to happen. I was expecting to see this number just follow suit and kinda drop down like it does every other year because inventory was sitting at 2,989 in the month of December, which is just up a little bit, 2,100 in December, 2023. So we didn't see this massive gap, for sure, eight, seven, eight, 900 listings more this year than last year, but in a city of our size and the amount of transactions that we have, that's nothing. Because if you look back at the last five to six years, you can see a trend that's happening in terms of the sheer number of sales that are happening in our city. So if you go back to 2019, we had 16,344 sales for the whole year. 2020, we had 16,149. Now, we all know what happened as we got into 2021, just more sales, more people came to our city, but this is where the trend has shifted. For a long time, we were seeing 16, 17, 15,000 listings, or sorry, sales happening every single year. But for the past one, two, three, four years, we have actually seen a total different number. 2021, we saw 27,600 sales. I'm just rounding. 2022, we saw 29,600 sales. 2023, we saw 27,400 sales. And 2024, we just got over 27,000 sales this year. So we have way more sales, 10,000 more sales every year than what we have normally seen in our city. Our population has grown, which I'm gonna get to also, and what could happen over the next couple of years, but it is just one of those things that is happening in our city. The sheer number of sales has increased like crazy. And with that, we have so much more data. I have so much more data in our market report. So if you want more information, go to the link in the description, grab it, but I'm moving on to months of inventory because right now in our city, we are sitting at 2.26 months of inventory. Last year in December, 2023, we were at 1.58 months. So it has gone up, but technically 2.26 is still in a seller's market. So take a look at this. I actually broke down for the month of December, all the different zones and where we are sitting at. The zones that are moving the slowest, which are the highest is 2.6 and 2.6, which is the Northeast and the city center. The fastest moving ones are Northwest, South and Southeast, all under two months of inventory. And the fastest one is actually the South zone at 1.76. So most of our city still is sitting in a seller's market. And so that kind of causes a little bit of frustration for buyers, a little bit of frustration for sellers. Some areas are moving much faster and much slower than others. And you can't just look at this, you gotta look at your neighborhood. What you can also look at is price points. So this is a whole new chart. I have never shown you guys. I am gonna start pulling this out so that you can actually start seeing this each month. But looking at this, again, if you have it, there's so much information on here. So you need to pause the video, pause it. I'll explain a few things. The green line up here is the number of actives that are for sale in that price range, which you can see all the price ranges on the bottom. Reds are the number of sales. And then the blue bars are the 30 day months of inventory. So just for the last month, what was the months of inventory for those price zones? So it's not zones, it's not neighborhoods. This is now just price brackets across the whole city. Two and a half months, that's the break point into the balance market, which would be this number right here, 2.5. So everything under $800,000 in the city is in a seller's market still. Because as soon as you go to 800 to 850, it goes to 2.6. 850 is three. Now 900 is actually at 2.2, which is interesting, 9 to 950. And then when you get to 950 to a million, it's actually at nine months of inventory, which is wild. You have 63 active and seven sales in that price range. But as soon as you break out and you go above a million, so one to one one, it jumps back down to 2.5 months of inventory. Now, as you move up in price ranges, you can see some of these low ones. Like here, this is one million to one one. Another three months of inventory is one six range. So 1.6 something. The 1.9 range is sitting at 2.4 months. Two and a half to three million is sitting at two and a half months. And your four to four and a half million is sitting at three months of inventory. So some of the areas and some of the price points that are higher priced are still moving really, really quickly. And that's the reason we've actually started doing a luxury market video every single month, where we're talking about only homes over a million dollars. Because of this change in our market that we're seeing, yes, we have slower areas, 100%. But there's a lot of higher end areas that are moving a lot quicker, just because there's a lot more sales that are happening in these areas compared to lower price points in our city. So now this gets to my favorite part. My favorite part is talking about stats that no one else is talking about. This is all off market stats. So here's a trend. I actually saw a comment where someone talked about this in a video a month or two ago. And they said, no one's talking about off market and the trends that are happening in those stats. And I was like, you're right, nobody is. And I'm gonna pull the data. I spent a couple of days figuring out kind of how to pull the data, pull the charts, and be able to show something for you on this video. And so here's what I got. Let's look at 2023 first. So 2023 is all back here, 2024 is up here. When you look back in December, we had 52%, 36%, 32, 26, 23, 21, 17, June. From June, I'll erase that, from June was 17% all the way up to December last year of 52%. Now, what does this mean? So the red line is the number of sold listings in the city. The yellow line is the total number of homes that went off the market. So expired, terminated, withdrawn, they went off the market that month as well. The percentages are the relations to that. So in last year, December, 2023, 56% of the sales actually were off the market, which is very normal, I would say in December, right? Because if people are listed, they usually take their home off before Christmas and sometimes or many times relisted January, February. That's very, very, very typical. I'm not surprised by that. And the big reason is you end up seeing dips in the spring, which is also very normal, right? Because there's more sales happening and whatnot. But what is not normal, what we are seeing that is different is right in here. This area has seen a massive growth compared to last year in homes that are not able to sell or sellers deciding to take it off the market. Many times it's either the home is not built yet, it's the price they're hoping they're not getting, it's, oh gosh, there's probably so many other reasons. Put them in the comments if you can think of more. But there's a lot of reasons for sellers taking it off the market. And a lot of it has to do with not unmet expectations. Let's say it that way. So in December, 2024, compared to 23, 97.73%. So literally as many sales that happened, which I think was about 1300 or so, as many sales has happened, that many homes went off the market as well. And this has been a trend for a little while. You can see 36, 47, 55, 55, 63%. These numbers are really, really high. And that kind of got me thinking, kind of got me wondering, where is this coming from? What is this trend? How does this play out? So if our inventory since, I think it was August, those numbers, the inventory itself still was, from here on was still doing really, really good. And the inventory started dropping. And it's all very expected. If a lot of those homes stayed on the market, we probably wouldn't have seen this drop as much. We might've seen that line do something like that. Not really that much difference. But what could happen in the spring, because we have this many properties that have come off the market, they're gonna come back on. So that means we're gonna see a jump in our inventory, which is okay. So the last number of years, we've started the year off with really, really low inventory. And that has pushed prices. So what could happen is we perhaps could end up seeing our inventory kind of jumping in this range. And maybe we're gonna see it come up in here. I doubt it. I really do doubt it. But there is a chance that we could see that. And most likely, this is so messy, but we're probably gonna see it somewhere in this range. It's definitely gonna be higher. And it may not be that high. But what I'm getting at here is the inventory that has come off the market, it's either gonna want to rent it or they're gonna wanna sell it. And the problem is rental rates, those have softened. So if someone has bought a property to, or built a property to planning on renting it, and now they're like, oh, I'm not making the cashflow I want. Now they're gonna try to sell it. Well, now they're not getting the price they possibly wanted or expecting two, three years ago, what they thought would be 20% per year or whatever the crazy numbers I've heard of people's expectations. They're just gonna go, what do I do? What do I do here? And so when we look into this further, you can kind of start seeing some of the zones and some of the areas where there's higher off market than others. So in the East zone, you only have 63% as of December. So homes that were, came off the market versus those that sold. But in some of these areas, in city center, in the North, the Northeast and the West, we were seeing over 100%. So that means there was more properties that came off the market in the month of December than those that sold. I find this very fascinating. I hope you do as well. Because when we started looking at actual property types, this also gets interesting. Full duplexes, I'm just gonna, it says 200%, but the numbers are so low. So I'm not even gonna really acknowledge it that much. But the one here is apartments and detached. Actually, all of them. Rows and semi-detached. Apartments had 123%. So there was 123% versus the sales versus what came off the market. Detached was 92, row houses 85, and semi-detaches were 73. So this got me thinking, because there's a lot of homes that have been built this year and have come to fruition and they've taken possession of them. And I kind of started wondering how many, so what were the year built, like the decade, right? What were the year built of these properties that went off the market? And here's what I found. I broke out of all the areas that had over 100%, so the number of off-market properties was equal to or greater than the ones that sold, those ranges, those areas, those zones, that type of thing, what decade were they built in? And here's what I came up with. Since the year 2000, this is the percentage of those areas. 2020 alone was 18 or 17% of all of those areas. So this here actually really ties into what I was just saying, that there's a lot of new builds that have come to the market and they came off. Now this is just December, right? This is not the whole year. This is just one month of December. So this kind of makes me really start wondering what could happen in the next year, because the growth gap between Alberta and the rest of Canada widened significantly last quarter, right? So the number of people that were moving around. While Alberta maintains a robust population growth of nearly 4%, the rest of the country has actually dropped below 2.5%. So you can see that on this chart. The scale of Alberta's 4% growth is actually quite remarkable. Let's put it in perspective. So if Alberta was its own country, now I've, you know, stick with me here because I've heard, born and raised in Alberta, I've heard this so many times, let's become our own country, sure. But if Alberta was its own country based on all of the population growth, it would rank second globally in population growth behind only South Sudan and ahead of many other African nations. Like legit, that is wild when you start thinking about it. But national immigration rates are slowing. Therefore, interprovincial migration has become a crucial driver of population growth. Alberta's strong influx from all the other provinces are likely gonna help maintain its position as Canada's growth leader through 2025 and 2026. So when we look at these stats and we're looking at all these numbers of what has happened, and we've seen decent growth in prices, you know, inventory staying low, all of these things could continue just because of this one thing, because Canada, or sorry, Alberta, if it was its own nation, is ranked second behind only South Sudan for growth of population. That is crazy. So there are many of you who have moved to Alberta from other places in Canada, and that probably is going to continue to happen. So something else that's coming up in 2025 is the sheer number of remortgages that are going to be taking place over this year. By the end of 2025, we can expect $408 million per year more going toward mortgage debt in Calgary compared to what was used for other things in our city. So stick with me. Let me quickly walk you through how this looks. So I used a whole bunch of sources and tried to figure out some rough numbers of how many households there are in Calgary. And I came up with a rough number of about 570,000 homes in Calgary. So I also found, as of 2023, in this article here, it said 35% of households are mortgage-free. So we looked at that and said approximately 200,000 of the 570 are mortgage-free. So that leaves us with about 370,000 households that have mortgages. Now, the national trend is about 23% of mortgages are up for renewal in 2025. So we can calculate approximately 85,100 mortgages in Calgary that will be up for renewal in 2025. I personally have one that's up for renewal in 2026. So there's a lot of you out there who have mortgages who got really, really low rates. So back in 2020, I found that the average mortgage loan amount from a CMHC number from Alberta was about $275,000. And that was in the first quarter of 2020. Now, the same period in 2022 was about $319,000. So given this trend, let's roughly assume a $300,000 mortgage, and we're using about a 1.9% on a 25-year amortization. That would be about $1,255 per month. Now, if you're planning on renewing this year, your mortgage rate is gonna be a lot higher, and you probably will be getting, if another fixed rate, maybe 4.25%, roughly. I don't believe fixed rates are gonna drop that much. Variables are gonna drop because we're in an inverted market still where variables should be lower than fixed, but they're not. So fixed rates are most likely gonna stay kind of where they're at. So if we have a 4.25% interest rate that you're getting, that makes your payment go from 1,255 up to 1,618 per month, $1,618 per month, nearly a 30% increase on the exact same mortgage. That's if your mortgage is exactly the same. So you might've paid it down, used some of it, and your mortgage is exactly the same. Let's just keep things equal and easy that way. So most estimates are saying that 30 to 40% is the correct increase of what you could see on your mortgage amount when you are renewing. So let's go back to that crazy number. On average, if there is a $400 per month increase per household that has a mortgage in Calgary, which is about 85,100 homes, that's over $408 million per year that is now going towards mortgage debt in Calgary that was used for other things in our city prior to. That kind of changes the landscape. This is just something to be aware of as we walk into 2025. What also happened in 2024 that was pretty big in our city was the single-family rezoning, going to the RCG zoning. At the end of 2024, we ended up seeing a court case that stated city councils moved blanket rezoning in Calgary to allow for greater housing density was done unlawfully and in a biased manner. Whether you are for or against this change, the revision of Calgary's rezoning regulations came after a marathon public hearing last April and May that saw 730 Calgarians present their views to council. While another 5,000-plus Calgarians sent in written submissions, it was the city's longest ever public hearing and lasted more than 100 hours, spread out over two-plus weeks. I remember watching these and maybe you stand in front of council telling them why you were for this or you were against this. Whatever the outcome of this lawsuit that has been put forward to the city to try to maybe re-change or maybe not be so heavy on the zoning, I don't know what's gonna come of it, right? Regardless of it, it's still going to change how Calgary will look in the future. In some of the inner cities, like Banff Trail, along 20th Ave, if you've driven along there, I drove there a lot, seeing a large number of multi-unit infills coming to the market and being built. Now, many of these are rentals. They're not just going on the market for sale. It's really changing how that community looks like. The number of sheer rentals that are being put onto our market in our city, it's pretty wild if you look, if you've seen the charts that I've shared over other videos. But this is something that is also gonna continue in 2025 and we're gonna kind of see what happens. What does this mean? So we're gonna keep watching this because this is one thing that can really mold and change how our city looks. I don't know if I'm for it or against it. There's parts of it that I like and there's parts of it that I just kind of feel unsettled with. Regardless of how this all shakes out, I just want our city to be one that is strong, that is caring, that is kind to each other, and we are able to leave something proud for our kids. For any of our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren, I want our city to be something that they are proud of, that they grew up in. All right, predictions, 2025. What is the next year gonna look like? For most of the market, we're still gonna see a sellers to a balanced market when it comes to months of inventory. Demand from those coming to Alberta is still gonna continue with an upward pressure on our market and keeping the number of sales high like we've seen over the past number of years. I'm guessing we're probably still gonna see that 26, 7,000 type year of number of sales. Now, what about inventory? Well, we could see some shifts in the inventory levels, albeit still lower levels, which will keep upward pressure on prices. Sellers, we're probably gonna need to understand that just because they want a certain price doesn't mean the market's gonna give it to them. Buyers will be buying with knowledge and power and possibly past experiences in a market that we could be going into. I also think that with the number of mortgages renewing, there will be not nearly as much inventory as some think coming to the market. Many current owners will want to make a move, but with the increased rates, they will realize they can't actually afford to upsize despite the increase of equity because their incomes didn't follow suit. So we could see some more inventory coming to our market from those that are actually moving out of Calgary, such as some of the more affordable areas. If you are looking for an affordable town around Calgary, if you go to the description, jump into our content and guide library, the link that's there, and inside there, we actually have a guide that talks about five affordable towns near Calgary. So we could also see more newly built homes that are vacant come to the market too. With the high number of investors that bought Sight Unseen, we could start to see them coming to the market for sale because rent prices have softened and they aren't covering their costs. So it might actually be better for them to sell. So watch for that. Now, with the population growth that we've seen and the possible tighter inventory levels still, and still potential population growth, I actually believe we could probably see still at least five if not a seven to 10% growth. Seven, 10% might be high, but probably that seven to 8% growth. 5% is probably on the low end. This is gonna be across the city for our benchmark pricing. We'll probably see very similar like we did last year. We'll see something in the spring kind of taken off and maybe it'll taper off the end of the year. I don't know, but I do believe we're gonna see anywhere from that five to seven, 8% growth over this next year. So the last thing I wanna predict is I actually believe we're gonna get a refresh of the rezoning changes. I don't think it's gonna be the same as what was before the change for the RCG. I don't believe we're gonna stay the same to what it is today with what the city changed it to. I think we're gonna possibly find some kind of a hybrid and something's gonna change and be refined even further. So I don't know what that's gonna look like, but I do believe in 2025, maybe 2026, we're gonna see a change to the bylaws again when it comes to zoning, just because there's a lot of people who are not happy with what that turned out to be. So I just really do believe we're gonna see some kind of change in there. So if you love more data, go grab our market report in the description, and you can also head up to this video here where we have stats all from last year as well.