Toronto region home prices dipped slightly from April to May — down $55,604 on average — but were still 15 per cent higher than May 2016, as the supply of resale house and condo listings rose 43 per cent year over year.

The average home price last month was $863,910 — $111,810 more than last May when houses and condos averaged $752,100 — according to month-end statistics from the Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB) being released Monday.

That is a 29-per-cent gain on the board’s benchmark price index.

The benchmark figure takes into account homes of similar characteristics such as size, location and the age of the property. The real estate industry considers it a more accurate gauge because it isn’t skewed by a particular housing category or price range.

Consumers may feel spoiled for choice given the increase over the historic low number of listings lately, but prices remain strong because supply is still relatively tight, said real estate board president Larry Cerqua.

“Homebuyers definitely benefited from a better-supplied market in May, both in comparison to the same time last year and to the first four months of 2017,” he said.

“However, even with the robust increase in active listings, inventory levels remain low. At the end of May, we had less than two months of inventory. This is why we continued to see very strong annual rates of price growth, albeit lower than the peak growth rates earlier this year,” Cerqua said in a press release.

There were 18,477 listings in May compared with 12,931 in the comparable month last year. In Toronto alone, there were 1,611 more homes on the market than in April, although both months are typically considered among the busiest for listings.

It is the third consecutive month that listings have increased, although May saw a significantly higher number of homes hitting the market.

It’s not clear how much of the change is the result of the province’s housing policy announcement on April 20 designed to cool the Toronto area’s overactive home prices, TREB officials said.

“The actual or normalized effect of the Ontario Fair Housing Plan remains to be seen. In the past, some housing policy changes have initially led to an overreaction on the part of homeowners and buyers, which balanced out later,” said Jason Mercer, TREB’s director of market analysis.

In Vancouver, where market cooling measures were introduced last summer, housing sales returned to near-record levels in May after several chilly months. Home sales rose 22.8 per cent compared with the previous month and 23.7 per cent above the 10-year average for May. The benchmark price there was up nearly 9 per cent from May 2016.

Before the release of the TREB data, Royal LePage Signature Realty agent Tom Storey said he was expecting to see a drop in sales in the Toronto area in May, but the increase in inventory is exactly what realtors have been wishing for.

“We saw growth in the first four months (of 2017) that would typically take a full year,” he said.

In hot urban real estate markets, high prices are pushing some house-hunters to the suburbs. But two Toronto realtors say the costs of living far from the city should be weighed against lower house prices.

Historically, sellers would look at spring as a great opportunity to sell and the province’s April announcement was well timed and probably goosed some sellers into listing, he said.

The province’s cooling plan, including a foreign buyer tax and expanded rent controls, started a discussion, Storey said.

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“Whether or not something’s actually changing, you end up with people talking about it and things are going to change,” he said.

But Storey said he attended two pre-construction condo sales in recent weeks. That sector would, in theory, be most affected by the government announcement, he said, and both developments sold out in two or three hours.

He thinks buyers are recognizing that there are more homes on the market and they don’t have to make a decision to buy in a few minutes or submit unconditional bully offers.

TREB numbers showed the boost in home choices didn’t increase the number of transactions in the Toronto region in May. Sales of detached houses were down about 26 per cent in the city and across the region. Condo sales also dropped 6.4 per cent year over year in May.