Canadian Real Estate Association number
I hate housing data from real estate associations. They're filled with positive spin and selectively-presented numbers to make the market look better than it is.
Given the run-up in Canadian housing, CREA is particularly bad. You have to dig through their numbers to find the real story.
Today the reported that housing prices were up 7.7%, but that's a year-over-year number.
The market peaked in April and has been sluggish since. Looking at the month-over-month numbers, sales prices fell 2.93% in January. It's the third consecutive month of decreases.
Those numbers are seasonally adjusted but an even bigger quirk was a change in national mortgage rules that took effect at the start of the year. It meant a 14.5% m/m drop in volume of sales to 39.6K. That's also a drop 7.5% y/y.
It's not all bad news for Canadian housing. The number of listings has fallen dramatically so there's no real sense of where the balance is in the market.
Looking ahead, the housing market is basically frozen at this time of year, like everything in Canada. The data to watch will run from March-May, when volumes are the highest. If there's any strain in the market, that's when it will show up.
