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“Demand is strong and the number of properties for resale is down, so market conditions are getting tighter,” CMHC analyst Francis Cortellino said in a phone interview. “The Montreal market is very dynamic at the moment.”

Daniel Cholewa, who as chief executive officer of Keller Williams Urbain in downtown Montreal oversees a network of more than 100 brokers, says transactions in the first quarter were up 45 per cent from a year ago, the best market he’s seen since entering the business a decade ago. Stories of bidding wars and 48-hour sales are becoming more frequent, he said.

“The market has been so stagnant and has been such a buyers’ market for so long here that growth is natural and it’s necessary,” he said in a phone interview. “The fact that this has been happening is a really good thing.”

Space Limits

The lack of building space on the island of Montreal is making detached homes a rarer find and will underpin a 5 per cent increase in prices this year, Paul Cardinal, market analysis manager at the Quebec Federation of Real Estate Boards. Condo prices will rise a more modest 3 per cent on average, though they are already up by more than 10 per cent this year in some neighbourhoods, including in several suburbs off the island, he said.

There’s also evidence that foreign buyers, now the target of a tax in Ontario and British Columbia, are taking a keener interest in Quebec’s biggest city. They owned 1.7 per cent of condos in Montreal last year, up from 1.1 per cent in 2016, according to CMHC data. That’s getting closer to Toronto’s 2.5 per cent and Vancouver’s 2.2 per cent.