We’ve noted this before, but it bears repeating: when you see a headline like this one from last week “Canada home prices fall,” it doesn’t necessarily reflect what’s happening where you live.

If that headline was about Alberta, it would read “Home prices keep rising.”

As new numbers from the Canada Real Estate Association show, the price a benchmark* home on Alberta’s resale market in May was almost 10% higher than 12 months earlier compared to a 2.4% decline nationally.

It was the same story on a month-over-month basis, with the national price falling and the Alberta price rising.

Up by 10% on a year-over-year basis (y/y), prices in the Calgary market were a little hotter than in Edmonton where the y/y increase came in at 6.3%.

It was a different story in Canada’s largest market with y/y prices retreating by 3.6% in the greater Toronto area.

Prices in Vancouver rose, but at 2.2% y/y, the increase was modest compared to uptick seen in Alberta.

The gap between the national benchmark and the Alberta benchmark remains large, but it has  decreased. In May 2023, the national benchmark price was $269.5K higher than in Alberta; a year later, it was $208K.

Within Alberta, the benchmark price rose to $577.8K in Calgary versus $384.7. Vancouver’s benchmark remained the highest among major cities at $1.2 million.

Even though the benchmark price has been on the rise in Alberta and the gap between it and the national benchmark has been shrinking, the province remains a relatively affordable option. The role of this affordability advantage is explored in our recent study “Chasing Affordability: The Return of Interprovincial Migration to Alberta.” As we reported last week, strong inflows from other provinces (especially B.C. and Ontario) continued in the first quarter of 2024.

*The MLS® Home Price Index (HPI) is based on the value home buyers assign to various housing attributes, which tend to evolve gradually over time. It therefore provides an “apples to apples” comparison of home prices across the entire country. Each month, the MLS® HPI uses more than 15 years of MLS® System data and sophisticated statistical models to define a “typical” home based on the features of homes that have been bought and sold. These benchmark homes are tracked across Canadian neighbourhoods and different types of houses.

Answer to the previous trivia question: The Edmonton Oilers joined the NHL for the 1979/80 season.

Today’s trivia question: If the Edmonton Oilers win game 7 tonight, what team will it be joining as the only other to successfully come back from a 3-0 deficit to win the Stanley Cup?