Many Calgarians may be feeling the burn of the city’s red-hot resale real estate market of late. The city has achieved recent all-time highs in every segment, while inventory remains at a multi-year low. Although an ideal mix for sellers, it’s a tough pill to swallow for buyers, especially those entering the market for the first time.
“It’s not that people can’t be homeowners here,” says Doug Cabral, realtor with Royal LePage Benchmark in Calgary. “It’s that people must adjust expectations and make compromises.” Based on Calgary Real Estate Board statistics from April — one of the busiest months of the year for real estate, if not the busiest — buyers remain very active, even as inventory fell 16 per cent year over year to 2,711.
That’s the lowest level for April in the last 15 years — though still well above the record-low set in 2006 when inventory was at 1,716 units. Sales this past April were also robust. Calgary’s market saw 2,881 sales, up more than seven per cent year over year, the third-highest level of activity since 2010.
Conditions, in turn, pushed the overall benchmark price to a new high of $603,700, an increase of nearly 10 per cent from April 2023. New listings, 11 per cent higher than April last year, provided some relief but “did not add to supply in a material way because sales were so strong,” says Ann-Marie Lurie, chief economist with CREB. New listings, she adds, reflect only homes that came up for sale over the course of .