Good afternoon Sutton Group Quantum and Happy 2024!
We hope that everyone had a restful and enjoyable holiday season with loved ones!
Welcome back!
what’s going on at the Q?
The New Year is always a very “interesting” time for Realtors as it signals a new beginning and marks the time for strategic planning to shape the year ahead. We’re going to do that together in 2024. Our calendar is chock-full of events and opportunities to help and inspire you.
We will be working with our agent advisory board to evaluate our support systems. We also have our business development and marketing team to help you get your message out to your past and future clients. The intimate relationship with marketing and business development services at Quantum have proven to set us apart once again in terms of production and success per agent for 2023.
Sutton Quantum also welcomed aboard Mark Cadesky in 2023 to support your deals and help with the new legislation and compliance. We also welcomed back in January Jessica Shipmaker to lead our Deals department and administration. We bid a fond farewell to Camila who is off to pursue her legal career. In 2023 we said goodbye to Valena as our CFO and welcomed Angela Wong as our new controller. We also welcomed back Melissa Gouveia from maternity leave.
An exciting development for Sutton The Brand. As you may have heard in the press release at the end of the year or BNN, Sutton was successfully sold to the former owner of Sotheby’s Canada, Ross McCredie. Ross has a track record of success in Real Estate in Canada and south of the border. Sutton Quantum hosted our new CEO at our Oakville office with the other regional franchisees. It gave us a great opportunity to showcase Ontario‘s flagship Sutton -our very own SQ. We were honoured to play a role in this next chapter. We will of course be watching closely as we’ve been assured that there will be some exciting rebranding and leading edge tech. We are looking forward to new opportunities in Q1 and 2.
Thank you to all of you who took part in the end of year survey. We will be reviewing the results at our first AAB meeting in January. Thanks to the members of the advisory board for continuing to volunteer their time to ensure that Sutton Quantum continues to be a gold standard real estate brokerage. We bid farewell to one of our beloved advisers Fred Hussey and we will be welcoming aboard new volunteer members! Many thanks to all of those who expressed interest in the agent advisory board. We try our best to represent the demographics of the office to best calibrate our resource decisions.
now what? 2024.
2023 was a roller coaster! Wasn’t it! One minute we had too many listings the next minute we had too many buyers… Then we turned right and saw the flipside. We crossed our fingers at every rate hike. It was painful to say the least… on top of it all, we had to navigate new legislation! oh what fun. Customers went the way of the Dodo. Despite it all, we made it through and we are now cautiously optimistic about 2024.
The overall sentiment seems to be that now is an optimum time to buy with short term financing versus waiting for the spring. Though there may be more inventory in the spring, the risk of waiting is that there will be pent-up real demand and any movement in the rates may cause a breach in the dam.
We hired Urbannation in the fall to come in and explain the structural housing deficit to the sales team so that they could better speak to the housing shortage. It was a very powerful session and everyone in the room would come to understand that the housing shortage is not going anywhere. On average, we built 45,000 houses per year over the past 20 years while the demand exceeded 75,000. That’s a problem. When we’re looking at constraints in supply, demand will inevitably continue to push prices up. Minimum estimates are around 5% in 2024. We also came to understand the systemic problem in the Ma and Pa rental pool model that is now tipping to the red. We expect more pressure on the rental market as this pool is becoming a less attractive investment at the current interest rates and price points. (Enter the attack on ABB). With over 14,000 new condo units on hold, these residential dwellings are not going to come onto the market in the GTA anytime soon. We also noted a new luxury tax of 3.5% on all properties in Toronto over 3 million. Will 905 brace itself for a tsunami of luxury buyers? Or will all Toronto residents under 35 move to Portugal?
Here’s what we do know, just as in 2023 - this is going to be a year of back to basics. There might be some opportunities for a very brisk market which can be delightful in many ways and stressful and others. Remember the multiple Wars? While we’re all hoping for a balanced market, the reality is that we might see another strange swing in market activity. Whatever happens, we’re in it together and we are going to solve the problems as we always do as a team. Help each other. Be kind to ourselves, our fellow agents, our support team, our competitors and mostly our broker of record.
With gratitude for this community,
Tina
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