Steady, stable real estate market predicted
If you ask Dawson Creek realtors what the 2021 real estate market was like – they’ll gladly tell you.
“It was the best year we ever had…by 20-percent,” says Royal LePage Aspire Realty’s Kevin Kurjata.
In fact, you would need to go back to 2012 to see numbers that would challenge last year’s figures.
Kurjata believes several factors led to a rise in home sales in 2021 and from a source many experts may not have expected – the pandemic.
“There were some financial things with Covid that put some people in the market that weren’t in before,” says Kurjata. “People were able to suspend their rent or mortgage for six months or had CERB payments coming in.”
He also points out that in 2020, when things began to shut down, we weren’t able to do a lot of things, more money might have been ‘squirreled’ away.
Blaine Nicholson with Remax Dawson Creek agrees with Kurjata’s assessment.
“2021 was a great market. Close to a record market in residential real estate sales,” says Nicholson, who feels it was a pent-up demand that spurred the market. “People would see that their neighbor’s house sold so they would put their house on the market, it would sell, and it would carry on from there.”
With families growing in the city, many of Nicholson’s clients are looking at getting into bigger homes.
“Three bedrooms with a basement, hopefully with a garage, much more affordable than a home down on the Lower Mainland or even the Okanagan.”
The average selling price for aa single-family home in Mile Zero last year was just over $350,500.
While home prices in Vancouver and several areas of our province went through the roof last year, the South Peace, for the most part remained untouched.
Kurjata tempers that by saying we could see a shift in 2022 based on what’s happening globally – the conflict in Ukraine, for example.
He points out Alberta, not BC., has a larger bearing on what happens here – a good economy in Alberta translates to a better market in the Peace Country.
Nicholson says he’s seeing a surge in residents moving from metro Vancouver to Dawson Creek looking to find work in the oil and gas patch. He notes this is very unusual and has never happened before.
“People are able to sell something in the Lower Mainland, come out with a pile of cash in their hand, purchase a home here, better than what they had, it’s mortgage free, and they still have cash in the bank.”
Kurjata predicts sales should remain steady through this year with a trend that started in late 2021.
“We should see significant price appreciation,” adds Kurjata. “I mean, if we do 80-percent of what we had last year, we’ll have an excellent year. I’m going to predict that we could see (based on early figures) a new record, maybe, 386…390?”
Looking further ahead, Nicholson believes getting the coastal GasLink pipeline into operation will also have a huge impact on the area’s market.
“It’s so big that it’s going to take an amazing amount of natural gas to get in that pipeline,” says Nicholson. “That natural gas is coming from underneath our feet. So, if we’re busy right now, and we don’t have the LNG flowing to the coast, it only makes sense that we’ll get even busier (when it does) .”