Barring any trade wars, 2025 is set up to be another strong year for housing activity in Northern BC.
According to the BC Real Estate Association’s First Quarter forecast, 42-hundred unit sales are projected for this year. Just over 4-thousand home sales were tallied in our region in 2024.
Chief Economist, Brendon Ogmundson expects the positive momentum to continue building in the near future.
“In 2024, the north was one of the strongest performers in terms of the housing market across BC and we are expecting that to more or less continue in and around the same pace scale of activity so around four percent this year and next with prices growing at a three percent rate.”
However, a trade war between Canada and the United States would like derail these projections and would also force the Bank of Canada to shift gears.
“Tariffs have the potential to upend all of that especially a region like the north where we saw what happened to some of those communities after the softwood lumber tariffs in 2018. That really has the potential to change the narrative for the outlook this year.”
“There is also a scenario where we get into a broad trade war with the US and we start putting up our own tariffs on USD imports into Canada, maybe that causes some inflation in Canada and the Bank of Canada can’t cut rates.”
Many economists are predicting that the Bank of Canada (BOC) will lower its key policy rate by a quarter of a percentage point on Wednesday.
This would bring it down to three per cent.
The BOC has lowered its key interest rate five consecutive times since June.
The annual inflation rate in Canada fell to 1.8 per cent in December.
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