Soaring home prices and regional extremes seen in the country’s hottest housing markets last year will likely narrow in 2017, according to a new survey.

The Royal LePage House Price Survey and Market Survey Forces report, released Thursday, revealed Canada’s real estate market saw year-over-year price appreciation in the final quarter 2016. Home prices increased 13 per cent year-over-year to $558,153 – the highest year-over-year national home price increase recorded in over a decade. The survey’s data, was compiled from proprietary property information in 53 of Canada’s largest real estate markets.

“The disparity in home price appreciation between Canadian regions has never been greater than that seen in 2016, with rates ranging from double-digit extremes in some cities to negative growth in others,” Phil Soper, president and CEO of Royal LePage, said in a release.

“This economic drama put real estate at the forefront of everybody’s mind last year, from the Prime Minister to the recent grad,” he added.
 

Soper said the likely move away from regional extremes this year will be a “very good thing.”

A number of housing measures were unveiled last year in an effort to cool the markets in Toronto and Vancouver – Canada’s two hottest housing markets. British Columbia introduced the foreign homebuyers’ tax, which took effect Aug. 2, 2016 and appeared to help cool prices in the Great Vancouver area in the months that followed.

Ontario has not introduced its own foreign buyers’ tax, but the province doubled the land transfer credit it offered to first-time buyers. The measure, took effect Jan. 1, 2017 and  amounted to an additional $2,000. 

But Soper told BNN in an interview Thursday that real estate is a "bad sector to try to make a quick buck," when it comes to speculators in the market because it's not a liquid asset. He said 

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