The Kamloops and District Real Estate Association says the local housing market was resilient in 2019 when many markets around B.C. saw declines.

The average single-family home price in Kamloops finished the year at more than $485,000, about $20,000 higher than 2018. KADREA President Wendy Runge believes affordability is still driving people here. “Some of the things that were meant to slow the market did in fact do that. Speculation Tax, Vacancy Taxes, things like that and of course new mortgage rules. Kamloops did seem immune to it. Of course we’re not party to some of those taxes, but the new mortgage rules didn’t seem to effect us too much.”

When looking at December alone, Runge says it was a surprising end to the year with 155 home sales and 188 new listings. She thinks there’s a good chance those strong numbers will carry into the early part of 2020. “I think if that continues to happen to the coast we will continue to see those good numbers. Typically January is kind of a quiet month. People hunker down and wait until mid-February or so when we say our spring market really gets going. We’ll see what happens. December surprised me, so January might as well.”

“Our B.C. Real Estate Association has an economist on staff and so we hear some projections that they have and they’re projecting us to have a good year, a slight increase of a year, nothing too major. But, I think they’ve been surprised at some of the things that Kamloops has been doing. We took everyone by surprise a bit this year with the strength of our market.”

There was a total of 2,862 home sales in 2019 compared to 2,974 in 2018. Brocklehurst led the way in 2019 with 293 homes being sold with Sahali the second strongest area with 236 sales followed by Abardeen with 230 sales.