In 2019 the Kamloops and District Real Estate Association, now a part of A.I.R. (the Association of Interior REALTORS®, released a platform called Buyer Path. We are the first real estate board in Canada to have this information, and it is a game changer!!!
The platform allows Kamloops REALTORS® to run different scenarios and collect information about–you guessed it–buyers. For example, If you wanted to know how many of the listings in Kamloops over $800,000 sell to people from out of town, you could go into the platform and find out. You can see where the buyers are coming from and where they are choosing to buy.
It’s been so busy the last three months, I was curious to see where buyers of single-family homes are coming from. Are these locals looking to get into the market during a traditionally quieter time? Are people looking to make a move to Kamloops this summer and buying now? According to Buyer Path, just over 50% of buyers from January to March 2022 are local, 31% are from Vancouver and the remaining from the rest of the province.
This is such a powerful platform, I can click on one sale and trace where the buyer came from. In the case shown, the buyer was from Abbotsford BC and purchased a single family home for over $800,000.
When compared to 2021 as a whole, the number of single family home buyers from Kamloops has actually dropped by 10 per cent in the last three months. In 2021, Kamloops and area buyers made up close to 62 per cent of the market, Vancouver and the Fraser Valley 19 per cent. One thing I also found interesting was the increase in buyers from Central and Northern BC in the last three months (9 per cent) compared to 2021 (close to 4 per cent).
When I looked at higher-density housing options such as condos, I noticed 70 per cent of buyers in 2021 were from Kamloops and area. This means there’s a lot more local buyers looking at higher-density housing than single family homes. I would speculate the reason for this is largely related to cost and overall availability of single family homes on the market. Vancouver and Fraser Valley buyers made up another 17 per cent of those purchasing condos, duplexes, apartments and townhomes.
Why is this important? Because the buyer path shapes our local market. Sometimes sellers feel they can list high because people coming in from Vancouver or the Fraser Valley often have higher buying power than buyers in Kamloops. This is part of the reason up to 75 per cent of sales go into multiple offer scenarios. In total, there were almost 4000 sales in 2021–a historical high. Cumulatively, the pressure of buyers from outside Kamloops and sellers taking the opportunity of their buying power, have pushed the Kamloops real estate market to historical highs in terms cost and sales.
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