'We're in a housing boom': St. Andrews, N.B. cashes in on red-hot real estate market
Sold signs have become a common sight in the small, tourist town of St. Andrews, N.B., with a skyrocketing real estate market seeing homes being snapped up - in some cases, sight unseen.
“The one thing I can say is that we’re in a housing boom,” says Paul Nopper, the town clerk and senior administrator for the town of St. Andrews.
“It’s been quite a unique season watching the houses go up for sale and within a week or two weeks the houses are turned over and sold.”
Debbie Grant is a realtor in the St. Andrews area. She says in the past year, there have been almost a hundred homes sold in the region.
“We, on average, have seen 65 and 70 listings in St. Andrews, Bocabec, and Bayside, and right now we’re averaging between 30 and 35,” says Grant.
“So, although we do have new listings coming on the market quite quickly, there are a lot of sales.”
A lot of sales and a lot of buyers that have been coming in from outside of the province, and even outside of the Maritimes – from places like Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and even as far as Vancouver.
“We’ve seen realtors talking with people to put up their prices,” says Nopper.
“A lot of residents from all over Canada … They think the value of the houses when they’re low are not of quality, so we’ve seen a lot of house sales go up $50, $60, $100,000 above regular asking.”
In the height of the summer tourism season, many people flock to the community of St. Andrews. However, the actual population of the town is only around 1,500 according to the census information from 2016.
And with the high real estate demand, there is concern about the already-existing housing crisis in the town – so much so that Nopper says housing development has been made number one priority by the new council.
A 2020 study on municipal housing from the Southwest New Brunswick Service Commission shows that all municipalities in the region ‘suffer from a lack of affordable, quality rental units’ – including in St. Andrews which the report says has the most expensive resale home stock in that part of the province.
“People are having struggles with affordability, people are moving in, but the workers we need and the people that help run St. Andrews don’t have places to live,” says Nopper.
“We have to find that balance between welcoming newcomers and maintaining our workers and maintaining our supports for them.”
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