The B.C. Northern Real Estate Board has released their latest home sales statistics which now cover the first six months of the year.
And it would seem Kitimat’s housing bubble, for now, has burst.
Kitimat reports 40 properties selling worth $11 million dollars through the first half of this year.
In the same time frame last year it was 94 properties worth $26 million.
Out of that is 25 single-family homes. Half of that 25 sold for less than $310,000, and took an average of 96 days to sell.
By the end of June there were 102 properties of all types for sale in Kitimat.
Overall for the entire area covered by the BC NREB, 2,376 properties were sold, down from 2,637 in 2014. That represents $601 million, versus $672 million last year.
“The BC Northern Real Estate Board reflects all of the economic realities associated with the significant drop in oil prices,” said BCNREB President David Black. (Unrelated to the David Black from page one.) “The communities that heavily depend on the oil and gas industries are experiencing some drops in volume; however they have been very strong markets in the past and will rebound. Those communities expecting to benefit the most from LNG had a great year in 2014 and have now returned to traditional volumes but at higher values. They will now have to wait for the beginning of one of these projects to actually realize the projected benefits.”