Adrian Bell, Century 21 Prospect Realty
5124 48 Street X1A 1N6 Yellowknife, NT, Canada

Nothing super exciting to report from December. Once again, epic low inventory levels. Stay tuned for my Year End Review blog post, coming within seconds. Much more exciting than December stats, I promise.

Well, Pantone has announced its colours of the year for 2021. What do you think? Hit or miss? At -42 degrees with four hours of daylight and propane gelling from one end of town to the other, I find it a bit hard to embrace "Illuminating Yellow". But "Ultimate Grey" is bang on! https://www.pantone.com/color-of-the-year-2021

As 2020 comes to a close, it’s important to reflect on silver linings. For example, Mabel and Brodie have never had a better work-life balance. Kind of like retirement, but in reverse. They seem to love it.

We're almost through 2020 (thank goodness) and the Yellowknife real estate market is showing signs of slowing down to a more normal pace. That said there are a couple of key differences from last year. We've seen more high priced homes move than in the previous couple of years, and that has had an impact on the average sale price. Inventory is at rock bottom, with only 27 listings on the market, and because there is less selection, even homes that have been on the market ...for 200+ days are finding buyers. Perhaps at a lower price than they originally hoped for, but they are selling nonetheless. The result of this older inventory selling off is that the average-days-on-market metric actually ticked up a bit. I really look forward to doing a year-end analysis a month from now. This has been a different year on so many levels, and I think it reveals a lot about Yellowknife's economy, and possibly its future.

Did you know you can get a forgivable loan from the NWT Housing Corporation to pay for the replacement of your aging above-ground home heating oil tank? I would be very curious to hear from anyone who has successfully accessed this program. It looks like it has been around since February 2018. https://www.nwthc.gov.nt.ca//services/fuel-tank-replacement

This is an interesting demonstration of how a room can be made to feel bigger or smaller depending on paint choices.

Wow! 44% increase in real estate prices in northern New Brunswick! Like NB, we have benefitted from relatively mild pandemic disruptions. Not to the same extent, to be sure, but we have felt some impacts. Yellowknife is not a retirement destination, and a pandemic won't change that, but we do experience a high level of population turnover every year, and right now I think the inflows are outpacing the outflows. It's just not an ideal time to move to southern Canada, given all the restrictions, higher health risks and shaky job prospects in a lot of places. But the opposite is true of Yellowknife and the NWT in general. Even with a 14-day self-isolation requirement for new arrivals, this is a pretty good place to be right now.

October 2020 is the books and once again Yellowknife's real estate market has topped its 2019 monthly tally. That makes this the fifth straight month in which 2020 has seen a greater number of transactions than 2019. Days on market has declined once again, and inventory is far, far lower than last year at this time. There are currently only 39 MLS listings between the three brokerages. To the end of October there have now been 268 MLS transactions in 2020. There were 244 ...by the same time last year. So that's an increase of 10%. We don't have all the information we would need to fully explain what is going on this year but I think the consistently dropping inventory levels give us a pretty good hint. Yellowknife is a transient city, and when our number of private homes is more or less stable as it is right now (very little new construction), the number of people moving to town and buying homes is more or less balanced out by the number of people leaving town and selling homes. Surely, both inflows and outflows have been reduced by the pandemic, but it may be that outflows have been reduced to a greater extent than inflows. People are still moving to our city, but people who might have otherwise left are staying put, both for health and job security reasons. Yellowknife is a relatively safe place to ride out the pandemic. I would be very curious to see what is happening with job vacancy levels at the GNWT and elsewhere. I bet they are quite a bit lower than they would be in a normal year.