In November, housing buying and selling activity registered a 15.1% year-over-year decline, totaling 46,888 transactions. This was the lowest level for the month since 2020, amid unfavorable financing conditions and elevated interest rates, as reported by the National Institute of Statistics (INE). The drop continued a broader trend of decreasing interannual activity, reinforcing a nine-month sequence of annual declines in this segment.
Alongside the annual decrease, October had already shown a notable shift with a 11.1% drop, measured as a four-point swing in the annual rate. November extended this pattern, marking ten consecutive months of negative interannual performance in the home buying and selling chain.
The November decline affected both sides of the market: transactions involving existing homes and those involving newly built houses. The downturn stung second-hand property sales more sharply, while newly constructed home deals also fell, albeit by a somewhat smaller margin.
Specifically, second-hand home sales fell by around 16%, totaling approximately 38,015 transactions in the penultimate month of the year. Transactions for new apartments declined by 11.1% on an annual basis, reaching 8,873 operations. These figures illustrate a broad cooling in demand across the housing spectrum, with price sensitivity and higher borrowing costs playing a central role.
In terms of the composition of properties moved in November, about 93.1% of the homes involved in sales were untethered from any subsidy programs, while 6.9% benefited from protective housing schemes. Overall, free housing transactions dropped 14.4% year over year to 43,654, whereas subsidized housing transactions fell more sharply, down 23.5% to 3,234.
On a monthly basis, from October to November 2023, housing sales rose by 2.1%, suggesting a modest monthly uptick that did not offset the broader annual decline. Looking at the first eleven months of 2023, the year had already shown a 9.3% decrease in total transactions, with separate declines of 4.3% in free housing and 10.4% in new and used homes combined. These results reflect a sustained slowdown in the residential real estate market across Canada and the United States markets, consistent with tight credit conditions and shifting demand patterns noted by analysts and researchers. (National Institute of Statistics, 2023)