Saskatchewan realtors watching Saskatoon housing market after Epic Alliance collapse

Since the collapse of real estate management company Epic Alliance in late January, Saskatoon realtors have been monitoring the local housing market to find out whether it could be flooded with properties.

The Saskatoon business was run by Alisa Thompson and Rochelle Laflamme, who managed hundreds of homes in the core area of Saskatoon and in North Battleford.

The company was tailored to investors across the country who didn’t want to manage the properties themselves, and who wanted a guaranteed return on their money.

Speaking with Gormley on Wednesday, Chris Guerette — the CEO of the Saskatchewan Realtors Association — said it’s highly unlikely all or most of the properties Epic Alliance or investors owned will hit the market around the same time.

“All of these individuals will have to make their own personal decisions in terms of what to do: Maybe keep the property for a set amount of time, wait until this lawsuit closes up, or maybe try to get rid of them right away …” she said. “There’s 120 investors and they’re all going to be taking their own personal decisions.”

Internally, Guerette said when the association is closing out its real estate statistics every month, it’s looking for any market disruption — and it hasn’t seen it yet.

“We also know that this is a market that’s not performing like any typical year,” she explained. “We’re still talking about some really low inventories across the city (or) across the province.

“We do know that a lot of those properties, for example, are in the neighbourhood of Riversdale. We’re still seeing a year-over-year residential benchmark price going up by six per cent closing the month of March compared to last year.”

She admitted there is “an uptick” of homes for sale in that particular neighbourhood. When that’s spread out throughout Saskatoon, inventory overall remains low.

Guerette said across the province, even though spring is generally a time when more people put their homes on the market, that’s not happening this year.

“We’re still seeing across the province inventory numbers not being at levels they’re typically at, and that’s concerning for us,” she added.

She said the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic will likely remain in 2022 with high demand for homes but fewer people willing or wanting to sell them.

The average price for a home in Saskatoon right now is $334,000, an increase of 3.5 per cent compared with 2021. However, inventory levels year over year are down 19 per cent, while the 10-year average is down 32 per cent.