The average selling price of a detached home in Barrie last month was $424,655, a 16% increase over March 2015.
"It's substantially unprecedented," said Mike Douglas, President of the Barrie and District Association of Realtors Inc.
"Historically if you went back 20 years house prices may have gone up between four to seven percent a year. So if you said five percent is an average over 20 years, then 16 percent is really high."
More competition than usual gets the credit or blame for the jump in prices, depending on which side of the listing you're on.
It's definitely a seller's market due to the low amount of houses for sale.
"Supply and demand is a little bit out of whack right now because there are more buyers than inventory, hence more competition on each sale," said Douglas.
"We're seeing competitive offers on way more listings than we have seen historically."
That means bidding wars and sold-over-asking in some cases - but not all.
One of the issues that's creating the "skewed balance" according to Douglas is due to the scarcity of homes for sale, home prices are higher, making it difficult to replace your home with something you like at the same or downsize.
The people who were the "move up" buyers at one time are waiting to downsize but won't due to limited choice and bigger prices.
"There's so much demand, the price is higher so those people may choose to stay where they are instead of selling their home because they can't downsize and pocket a lot of money and I think that's a big factor," explains Douglas.
"People think, now we're empty nesters and don't need four or five bedrooms, but for them to buy a 1500 square foot bungalow right now, It's going to cost them the same or more, so they stay."
Those people don't move out of the way for other homebuyers, many of them from the ripple effect of pricey Toronto who come house-hunting in Barrie's more affordable market.
"It has a huge affect on our market," said Douglas. "There's lots of buyers coming from there, but the logjam is because people in our market can't or don't want to go through the market right now."
Douglas cannot predict how long the imbalance of supply and demand will last but he says it's something we haven't experienced in a long time.
"Maybe that'll change but right now its a great time to be a seller."
More housing market by numbers:
Residential Townhouse, Link and Semi-Detached homes in Barrie posted an average selling price of $323,945 in March 2016, a 25% increase over the previous March.
Condominium sales average for Barrie for the month of March 2016 was $246,735, a 20% increase over March 2015.
The Town of Innisfil led the way with the highest average price increase for detached homes.
The average selling price was $464,130 in March, an increase of 20%.
In Essa Township, detached residential properties had an increase of 15% with an average selling price of $432,702.
The average selling price for detached residential properties in Oro-Medonte in March 2016 was $450,033, an increase of 5% over March 2015.
Detached residential homes in Springwater Township posted an average selling price in March 2016 of $566,390, a 2% increase over March 2015.
