There’s something weird going on in Toronto. And while strange happenings and oddities are nothing new to this city, this latest weirdness is really shaking some Toronto Realtors. They’re bidding wars, and they’re happening over and over again. In a city where the housing market has been sleeping soundly for the past several months.
“I was shocked,” says Toronto Realtor, Peter Krpan.
That was after just telling some of his buyers that they could take their time on the market, and probably even get away with offering below the asking price. After all, the market has been softening for months and there are few buyers and a lot of sellers on the market right now. So even when this couple was looking for something in Toronto’s most enviable downtown core, Krpan wasn’t worried; and he didn’t think his clients should be either.
The fact that this particular couple also had their eye on two different condos also seemed to be working in their favour. Until they got outbid on both.
“I thought, ‘This can’t be happening. This isn’t in keeping with what we’ve been seeing the last few months at all,” says Krpan.
But this activity is what some have been expecting to see, and what they were hoping would happen soon in the market. Because that whole time that prices were going up (sometimes as much as 2 or 3 per cent per month,) there were some buyers who refused to be a part of the frenzy. They knew that the market would die down eventually, and instead of rushing out to get what they needed now, now, now – they instead sat out. And saved. And waited for the market to get back into balance.
That may not have happened back in November and December, when the market was just starting to cool because those on the sidelines were still waiting. No one wants to enter the market just as it’s beginning to crash; and so, those sideliners were waiting to make sure that wasn’t going to happen. Now that that no longer appears to be a danger, they’ve come back to the market. Oh sure, we may still not be seeing the huge influx of buyers that we were this time last year, but they’re coming back.
“I think people who have been standing on the sidelines are realizing that we’re not having a crash. We’ve had a lot of clients come out of the woodwork the last couple of weeks,” says another Toronto Realtor, Joanna Kalbarczyk.
