News & Events

The Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) and five local real estate associations today introduced a new home price index that is designed to improve the tracking of residential property values in Canada. The MLS House Price Index (MLS HPI) is a sophisticated gauge of home values that attempts to eliminate biases caused by both ‘quality’ and quantity variations over time that can often distort average or even median home prices.

At today’s launch, figures for January 2012 were released and they showed that the national MLS HPI composite rose slightly by 0.3% from December 2011. This followed declines 0.2% in December and 0.1% in November. Relative to a year ago, the national composite was up 5.2%, which was just a tad stronger than the average annual increase registered by average prices in the fourth quarter of 2011 (4.1% using seasonally-adjusted figures). Of the five markets comprising the national composite, Toronto recorded the strongest year-over-year rise (7.6%) according to CREA (numbers for other markets were not immediately available).

All things considered, the new measures of housing values in Canada provide further evidence that property appreciation is proceeding at a modest pace overall in Canada. We will be looking forward to use the new sophisticated tools introduced today to monitor future developments.

Link to the full report:
To view and download the new report, click on the following link:
http://www.rbc.com/economics/market/pdf/housingpriceindex2012.pdf