Whitehorse house prices up over 2014

The average price of a single-detached home in Whitehorse jumped nearly $11,000 over last year, according to figures from the Yukon Bureau of Statistics.

More than $33 million worth of houses were sold in Whitehorse during the third quarter of 2015. The average sale price was $419,700, up from $408,000 the same time last year.

But Gary Brown of the Yukon Bureau of Statistics says it's hard to identify a clear pattern from the figures, because sale prices have been fluctuating wildly over the last year.

"I think this is more reflective of the higher-end homes moving more than the average or lower-end homes over the last couple of quarters," he said. "

There's been a fair bit of movement in the $500,000-plus homes and I think that's bringing the average up a fair bit."

The highest average prices were in the Granger subdivision at $522,000 per house. The lowest average prices were downtown at $329,400.

But given the size of Whitehorse's real estate market, Brown said a few sales can skew the average sale price.

"It's not a huge number of sales, and that number can jump around a fair bit depending on what the mix of the houses that were sold are," he said.

The number of single-detached houses sold in the third quarter was 79 this year, down from the five-year average of 88.

Condo sales are also an increasingly large segment of the real estate market. Third-quarter sales totalled $15.9 million in 2015, although that's less than the record high of $24 million in 2012.

The report said there is a lot of volatility in condo prices, in part because of the large amount of condo construction in recent years.

"Back in 2005, the numbers were so small, most quarters we couldn't even report them," Brown said."And over the last three or four years, there's been some quarters where there's been more condo sales than house sales."

A total of 205 real estate transactions took place in Whitehorse in the third quarter of 2015, the report said. The total reported value of those sales was more than $67 million.