The association said that on a seasonally adjusted basis, a total of 1,648 new listings came onto the Multiple Listing Service markets in Winnipeg, Brandon, Portage la Prairie and Thompson in July.
That was 105 more than in the previous month, and was the highest monthly total since 1,790 listings in August 2000.
The Manitoba surge was part of a trend that saw new-listing records set in Ontario and Quebec, and listings surpass the 80,000 mark for the first time in Canada as homeowners scrambled to take advantage of recent price gains and put their properties on the market.
Canada's July total of 80,147 units was an increase of 1.4 per cent from June and rose half a per cent from the previous record set in May, the association said.
"We're facing a far more balanced market than we did last year," Gregory Klump, the association's chief economist, said. "There's a lot more product from which to choose. Buyers can afford to be in less of a hurry."
What Canadians are seeing, said Michael Gregory, an economist with BMO Capital Markets, is "a healthy correction."
"When you have double-digit price gains on a nationwide basis for several years, you're going to have to pay a little bit of that back at some stage," he said.
While Manitoba homebuyers had more properties to choose from in July, Klump said new listings are still running well behind levels that were commonplace in the 1980s and 1990s.
He said the historical peak for new listings in Manitoba was 3,106 units set in December 1989. The historical low was 1,045 in January 2005.
"Even with the spike in new listings in July, it was still a sellers' market," he said. "It's not nearly as strong a sellers' market as it was a year ago, but it's still not a buyers' market."
Nor is it a balanced market. He said if sales were to continue at their current pace -- 1,262 units in July -- new listings would have to jump another 53 per cent (to about 2,520 units) before Manitoba would be a balanced market.
While the Manitoba market is tilted in the sellers' favour, it has become a more balanced in other provinces such as B.C. and Saskatchewan, the association said. It's also showing signs of stabilizing in Alberta.
Klump said affordability in Canada has been eroded by recent price gains. "That's one of the reasons you have fewer buyers this year, just from an affordability standpoint."
Then there are those who have made investments and are selling "at the tail end of a very healthy ride."
--Staff/The Canadian Press
murray.mcneill@freepress.mb.ca
Property props
More Manitoba real estate records:
Sales of existing homes in Manitoba rose by 7.4 per cent last month to a new record of 1,262 homes. The old mark was 1,208 set in May 2007. Nationally, sales flattened to 38,870.
Manitoba also set a new record (in actual numbers) for the most unit sales during the first seven months of the year, at 8,777 units. The previous record was 8,729 in 2007.
A new dollar-volume record also was set last month for both a single month (up 8.4 per cent to $244.4 million) and for the first seven months of the year (up 15.6 per cent to $1.7 billion). Nationally, dollar volumes fell by 1.2 per cent to $11.8 billion in July and by 9.5 per cent to $84.8 billion for the first seven months.
Source: Canadian Real Estate Association
