Canada home prices fall for fourth straight month: Teranet

[February 13, 2019]  OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canadian home prices fell in January for the fourth consecutive month led by weakness in major Western Canadian cities, data showed on Wednesday.

The Teranet-National Bank Composite House Price Index, which measures changes for repeat sales of single-family homes, showed prices fell 0.1 percent last month from December 2018.

Prices fell in four of the 11 markets surveyed, with cities in the oil-rich province of Alberta posting the largest drops. Edmonton prices fell 0.8 percent, while prices in Calgary were down 0.5 percent.

Vancouver prices fell 0.3 percent. It was the sixth straight month of declines for Pacific Coast city, which boasts the most expensive housing market in Canada.

"Those three westernmost markets have been trending down markedly for months now," Teranet said in the report, noting that was in contrast to major cities in the eastern Canadian province of Quebec.

"Montreal and Quebec City were the only indexes at an all-time high in January," Teranet said.

Canada's once-hot housing market has softened in the last year, weighed by tighter mortgage rules and five interest rate hikes from the Bank of Canada since July 2017.

Prices rose 2.2 percent in January on an annual basis, led by a 6 percent increase in the capital region of Ottawa-Gatineau, though prices fell 0.3 percent in January compared with December in that same region.

(Reporting by Julie Gordon in Ottawa; Editing by David Gregorio)

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