Home sales continued to flag and prices dipped slightly as the annual winter slowdown hit the 91原创 real estate market in November.

The number of homes changing hands dipped in November compared to the previous year, while the number of houses still for sale remained higher than last year, as a year of higher interest rates continued to dampen the appetite of buyers.

Slower sales are not unusual in the late fall and through the winter 鈥� November through January is traditionally the quiet season of the year for real estate.

But this year鈥檚 numbers across the region were low even by that standard.

Across the region, there were just 891 home sales in November, according to statistics released by the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board (FVREB). That was a drop of eight per cent from October, and made this the ninth-slowest month for housing sales in the last 10 years.

In addition, the number of homes newly listed for sale dropped as well, at 2,030 down 20 per cent from October. There were 6,254 homes in total listed for sale, down five per cent from October, but up 17 per cent compared to November of last year.

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Just 46 single-family homes sold in November in 91原创, down 22 per cent from the same month last year. There were 46 townhouse sales, up 24.3 per cent from 2022, and 63 condo sales, a 26.7 per cent decline.

All types of housing saw slight declines in price from October, down 0.6 to 0.8 per cent. Prices are still 4.3 to 7.4 per cent higher than the same month a year ago.

The benchmark price for a typical single-family home in 91原创 in November was $1.522 million, for a townhouse, $862,800, and for a condo, $604,900.

According to the FVREB, the sales-to-active listings ratio was 14 per cent, meaning the market was 鈥渂alanced,鈥� favouring neither sellers nor buyers.

鈥淲e anticipate this holding pattern, defined by slow sales and declining new listings, will continue through the winter months until we see some downward movement in interest rates,鈥� said Narinder Bains, chair of the FVREB.

Prices have yo-yoed wildly over the past three years.

The pandemic briefly killed off homebuying, but by mid-2020, rock-bottom interest rates and newly-minted at-home workers looking for more space meant a boom in prices.

That trend saw the price of a detached house spike from just over $1 million to a high of $1.9 million in the FVREB area between 2020 and early 2022. The trend abruptly ran out of steam as interest rates went up starting in 2022, and the average price of a detached house in the Fraser Valley is now under $1.5 million.