Photo: James Bombales

With the average price of a home in Canada up by $135,000 over the past 12 months, it’s no surprise that the majority of homebuyers are having a hard time keeping up with the market these days.

New survey results released this week by Point2Homes in its 2021 Homebuyer Survey found that 53 percent of respondents can’t keep up with escalating home prices.

“We can keep up with the house price increases, but not for much longer,” said an unnamed respondent in the report. “We are very close to hitting our maximum.”

The Point2Homes survey explains that buyer concern around the low level of available homes for sale has increased from last year. In 2021, 17 percent of respondents reported that they were concerned that they wouldn’t have enough properties to choose from, an increase from 13 percent of participants who shared this concern in 2020.

When it came to other worries about buying a home, 24 percent of participants expressed anxiety over whether they are financially stable enough to afford buying a home.

“Despite every article at the beginning of the pandemic claiming the housing market would crash, it had surged unbelievably,” said another unnamed respondent. “Houses are selling way over asking and I’m having trouble finding a house in my price range.”

The pandemic created a climate of uncertainty for buyers last year, with just 12 percent of home seekers reporting that they were still ready to buy despite the unknowns in 2020, Point2Homes reported. Although Canada is still grappling with the pandemic, when asked if the consequences of COVID-19 had changed their homebuying plans, 38 percent of those surveyed in 2021 said that they were determined to purchase when they found the right property.

Thirty-five percent of respondents said that they weren’t sure and were keeping an eye on the market when asked the same question, and eight percent said they would “probably stop looking for the time being.”

Photo: James Bombales

Point2Homes commented that this buyer determination is “precisely what keeps the fire burning under the already red-hot housing market.” Despite this tenacity, the majority of buyers still seemed uncertain about their purchasing timeline. Forty-four percent of participants said that they didn’t know when they would ultimately buy a home, up from 27 percent.

Fourteen percent said that they had hopes to buy within the next six months, which is a steep drop from the 31 percent of buyers who planned to purchase within the same six-month timeline in 2020, Point2Homes said. A cumulative 17 percent of respondents indicated that they want to purchase within the next five years or more.

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