Montreal real estate: Westmount prices hit a new high!
10 Jun 2019
Westmount prices hit a new high this week with the $9-million sale of a heritage estate belonging to Montreal shoe baron Aldo Bensadoun. The highest Westmount sale previously recorded in the Centris system was for $8.3-million.
According to listing broker Joseph Montanaro, a broker with Sotheby’s International Realty Quebec, the 16-room, six-bedroom, five-bathroom mansion was sold to a New York-based buyer with children who are attending school in Montreal. The home, on Braeside Place, was listed for just under $10-million, and sold for north of $9-million.
As in many of his sales, Montanaro represented both the buyer and the seller in the transaction. While double-ending a deal is controversial for some in the industry, Montanaro said being the sole intermediary often makes it easier to get a deal done. In this case, for example, Montanaro said, the house practically sold itself.
“This was the first and last house I showed them,” Montanaro said. “They fell in love as soon as they saw it.”
For homes at this price point, it can take a while to find a match with the right buyer. In this case, the home was on the market for almost 18 months, but Montanaro said it isn’t uncommon for ultra-high-end listings to sit on the market for two years or more. Westmount homes under $2-million, however, are moving so fast that some never actually get listed.
“Westmount homes between $1- to $2-million are selling within a week, if not a day,” Montanaro said. “That segment of the market is truly, truly on fire. If houses are priced well, they’ll disappear in 24 hours. There are some houses we don’t even have time to put on Centris before we find a buyer.”
Montanaro said sales of higher-end homes started to take off about three years ago, thanks to increased interest from both local and foreign buyers. Including this most recent sale, Montanaro was the listing broker for the five highest-priced sales in Westmount in the past 18 months, all of which sold for over $5 million. He said of those sales, four out of five were to foreign buyers.
“They’re from all over the place: the U.S., South America, China, the United Arab Emirates. It’s really been from all over. Montreal is an international destination, attracting international buyers,” he said.
Over the past five years, Montreal real estate has seen a big jump in real-estate prices (by our standards, if not Toronto’s or Vancouver’s). The biggest gains have been in the city centre, in Westmount, Hampstead, Mount-Royal and Outremont, where the average price of a single-family home is now $1.8-million — a 16-per-cent increase over last year.
According to Centris statistics shared by the Quebec Federation of Real Estate Brokers, in the past five years, the average price in the city centre has increased 48 per cent, compared to 23 per cent for the metropolitan area and 33 per cent for the island of Montreal.
Montanaro said several factors are heating up the market. The buoyant economy is giving local buyers more confidence to upgrade their home or enter the market, he said, interest rates are low, and new money is also coming into the city from outside Montreal.
“I believe it’s a confluence of factors such as a more stable political environment, a great local economy and an influx of wealthy foreign buyers wanting to live in Quebec and looking for opportunities after cities like Vancouver and Toronto started taxing foreign buyers,” Montanaro said.
Unlike Toronto and Vancouver, where many foreign-owned homes bought for investment purposes have been left to sit empty, in Montreal, Montanaro said, like the buyer of the Braeside home, many international buyers are in the market for a home for their families while their children attend school in Canada.
“Our school system is a big draw, especially the private schools in Westmount,” said Montanaro.
