Are house prices dropping in Langley? How to check it yourself

This is the question I hear most, and the honest answer is that nobody knows where prices go next. Not me, not the bank, not the person on the radio. What you can know is what prices did last month, in your neighbourhood, for the kind of home you want to buy. That number is published, it is free, and most buyers never read it.

Where the real numbers come from

Langley sits inside the area covered by the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board (FVREB). Every month the board publishes a statistics package built from the sales that actually closed on the MLS® system. It is the closest thing to a record of what happened, because it is built from transactions and not from opinions.

The package breaks the region into areas, and Langley is one of them. It also breaks the numbers down by property type: detached, townhouse and apartment. That split matters more than anything else in the report. A month where condos soften and detached homes hold is not a month where "prices dropped". It is two different markets doing two different things.

Read the report on the board's own website, fvreb.bc.ca. Headlines quote it, but they quote the line that makes the headline.

The benchmark price is not the average price

The board reports a benchmark price. It describes a typical home of each type in each area, built from a model of the features those homes usually have. It exists because the average price is easy to distort. If a handful of large acreages in south Langley sell in one month, the average jumps, and nothing about your townhouse in Willoughby changed.

So when you read the report, start with the benchmark for your property type in Langley. Then look at how it moved against the month before and against the same month a year earlier. One month is noise. The same month a year apart is a comparison that at least accounts for the season.

Price is the last thing to move

The figures I watch first are not prices. They are the number of sales, the number of active listings and the ratio between them. When listings pile up and sales slow, sellers start competing for fewer buyers, and that shows up in price later. When sales climb and listings thin out, buyers start competing, and that also shows up later.

The report gives you those counts. It may also give days on market. A home that sits is telling you something before any price chart does.

None of this is a forecast. It is a description of the pressure in the market today, which is the only part of the market you can actually act on.

Your street is not the region

A regional report is a summary of thousands of different homes. The home you are looking at is one of them. A building with a special levy coming, a street backing onto a new arterial road, or a townhouse complex where three identical units are listed at once can all sit well away from the regional number in either direction.

This is why the last comparable sales matter more than the report. What did the same floor plan sell for in the same building? What did the house two streets over close at, and how long did it take? That is the evidence an appraiser will look at when your lender sends one, and it is the evidence I use when I help a client decide what to offer.

How I handle this question

When a buyer asks me whether prices are dropping in Langley, I do not give them an opinion. I open the latest board report with them, find their property type in the Langley area, and we read the benchmark, the sales and the listings together. Then I pull the recent sales for the specific homes they are considering.

After that, the question changes. It stops being "is the market going down" and becomes "is this home priced against what similar homes actually sold for". That question has an answer. If you buy a home you can afford, for a price the evidence supports, to live in for years, the month you bought in matters far less than it feels like it does today.

Thinking about buying or selling in the Fraser Valley? Message me and we will go through your options.