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<\/a><\/p>\nI’ve had a lot of conversations with folks about the current market, and it’s pretty interesting to hear some of the anecdotal impressions people get by watching their neighbourhoods, or from conversations with friends.\u00a0 “A lot of people seem to be leaving town” is a comment that I’ve heard pretty frequently over the last four months.\u00a0 But from what I can tell, the opposite is true, and it’s one of the main reasons inventory numbers are so low.\u00a0 People are staying put.<\/p>\n
I won’t have the numbers for 2021 until next summer, but the 2020 statistics for people flowing into and out of the territory are pretty telling.\u00a0 And in fact, these aren’t numbers for calendar 2020, but for fiscal 2020\/2021, which is even better, because they reflect 12 full months of pandemic (April 202o to March 2021).<\/p>\n
In 2020\/2021, inflows were not exactly record breaking, but they weren’t abnormally low.\u00a0 Over the last decade they have been lower three times – 2012\/2013, 2017\/2018 and 2018\/2019.\u00a0 But outflows, people leaving the NWT, were lower than any other year in the past decade, and by a good margin.\u00a0 So in other words, inflows are down a bit, but outflows are down a lot.\u00a0 And with almost no new housing stock being built, the result is fewer net homes listed for sale.<\/p>\n
I should point out that these are territorial figures, so they include more than just Yellowknife, but Yellowknife accounts for the lion’s share of transactions.\u00a0 And, if anything, Yellowknife tends to benefit from in-flows from the other communities.<\/p>\n
All this to say, unless something significant happens in the next three to four months which enables a return to the mobility we were used to pre-COVID, it’s probably going to be another hectic year in the Yellowknife real estate market.<\/p>\n