Rising interest rates cool previously hot Maritime housing market

The Maritime housing market is not what is used to be, with higher interest rates cooling the recent real estate craze.

Mail carrier Luc Roy spends a lot of time on the streets of Moncton, N.B. When he started his career two years ago “for sale” signs were seemingly on every other line, but now he’s noticing something different when he walks his route.

“I have seen a decrease, especially from when I first started, the market was booming,” Roy says. “There was a lot of houses for sale everywhere.”

But that’s no the case these days. Rising interest rates have thrown cold water on what was a hot housing market.

“It felt like almost the tap just kind of shut off as far as the momentum of what we had previously,” says real estate agent Danielle Johnson.

Johnson says buyers are now being more selective because the gap in supply and demand is shrinking.

“We are seeing a little bit more of an inventory coming up on the market and, I believe, people believe it is the last time that they will have access to this type of market,” she says.

It’s the same story in Halifax.

“We’ve grown the inventory from about 250 listings to about 750 in Halifax, but then it has just stayed steady for about the last eight weeks or so,” says Matt Honsberger, the president of Royal Lepage Atlantic.

That has caused prices to level off too. Honsberger says the average price for a home and Halifax has dropped from the mid $500,000 range to the low $500,000s or high $400,000s.

“We certainly saw the peak at around March of this year, where you would’ve seen the highest average price that we have ever seen in Halifax specifically, and it has come back to early year levels, late 2021 levels,” Honsberger says.

With interest rates high, Honsberger says he wouldn’t be surprised if the housing market in the Maritimes continues to cool over the winter.