With jobs in Alberta's oil and gas sector, Jackie and Andrew Bodner were tempted to put their Calgary house up for sale in January just as layoffs were mounting and homeowners were flooding the city's market with new listings.

The couple was planning to move to Edmonton, where Mr. Bodner's oil field services company was headquartered, but they weren't set to move until the summer.

"We were in a position where we had to move and we had to sell," Ms. Bodner says. "So the biggest conversation we had was: 'Do we hurry up and get to the market before everybody else, or do we ride it out?'"

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Their realtor encouraged them to wait out the market turmoil. They agreed, opting to list their custom-built home in family friendly northwest Calgary last month for $550,000. It sold in a matter of weeks at just $5,000 less than their asking price.

The Bodners's experience is not unique. Despite being at the epicentre of the turmoil in Canada's energy sector, Calgary's housing market is largely defying expectations of a crash.

Average resale prices were down just 1.5 per cent from the previous May, driven by buyers shifting toward more affordable homes, the Calgary Real Estate Board reported. The benchmark price, a measure of what the same property is worth over time, actually rose 0.96 per cent to $454,100.

The dramatic surge in listings, which spiked in December and January, has started to reverse. New listings fell 32 per cent in May compared to last year. A similar fall in listings in April prompted Royal Bank of Canada senior economist Robert Hogue to declare that "the worst may be behind us for hard-hit markets such as Calgary and Edmonton."

Granted, Calgary's market has hardly been immune to the drop in oil prices since last fall. Sales in May, typically peak season for the market, were 30 per cent lower than the same time last year as Alberta's unemployment rate rose to 5.8 per cent, the highest since 2011.

But so far it has been the market for high-end expensive homes that has borne the brunt of the region's economic woes. Some multimillion-dollar homes are languishing on the market for months, advertising price cuts as steep as $700,000. Meanwhile, more affordable homes, particularly detached houses listed for below $500,000 in good neighbourhoods, have remained a hot commodity.

While the market for higher-priced homes is being held back by the lingering uncertainty among energy workers, low interest rates continue to drive demand for lower-priced homes, particularly among those who work outside the oil and gas sector, such as health care workers, teachers and public servants.

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Colin Kehler, who was the Bodners's realtor, calculates Calgary has just one month worth of supply on the market for detached houses priced below $450,000, but nearly seven months of supply for properties listed above $750,000.

He recently listed a home for $405,000 in Southwest Calgary that sold in just a day for $5,000 less than asking price. The homeowner had contemplated selling it last year, when Mr. Kehler had expected to list it for $370,000.

Calgary is still a buyer's market, even for entry-level homes, Mr. Kehler says. But buyers who are shopping around for a bargain are coming away disappointed.

"You get an offer and it's low because even at that low price point they think they can get a deal right now," he says. "Then they learn quickly they've got competition and a chance for multiple offers."

Yet even as Calgary homeowners adjust to the downturn in the oil sector, the city's housing market is facing its next challenge: a new NDP government, whose plans for climate-change rules and a review of royalty fees energy companies pay to the province have put a new chill over what appeared to be gradually improving consumer confidence.

"People kind of feel that oil has started to stabilize, but now there's a bit of uncertainty about where the NDP government is going to go," Mr. Kehler says.

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The surprising change in government has added another layer of concern for Calgary's housing developers, many of whom had already shelved plans for new construction this year.

"I'm willing to take market risk. I'm willing to take all kinds of risks, but legislative risk is a tough one," says Trent Edwards, chief operating officer for the Alberta division of Brookfield Residential Properties Inc.

The company recently opened a new subdivision in Northwest Calgary, but is holding off on starting a much larger planned development until it can gauge where the new government is headed with its royalty review.

"If it comes out as being too punitive and you start to see large oil and gas companies move out of the province, when that domino starts to fall it's a hard one to stop," Mr. Edwards says. "That will be something that everybody is watching."

The lingering uncertainty hanging over the economy hasn't fazed the Bodners. Although Ms. Bodner is on maternity leave and work has slowed down somewhat for Mr. Bodner's company, the couple opted to buy a larger home in Edmonton than the one they left behind in Calgary. They purchased a six-bedroom estate home at the higher end of their $600,000-$800,000 price range.

"Is it scary? Absolutely," Ms. Bodner said. "But it's just part and parcel of being in this industry. The oil price goes up sometimes really, really high and sometimes its down really, really low, and you just hope that you're in a position to be able to ride out the storm."