Property listings  continue to fly off the shelf in what many are calling Ontario’s hottest market for agents – a stone’s throw from the GTA.

Hamilton recorded a significant increase in home sales for the third month in a row, registering a 31.2 per cent increase, according to the latest figures from the Realtors Association of Hamilton-Burlington.

“The real estate market exploded in June,” said Realtors Association of Hamilton-Burlington (RAHB) CEO Ross Godsoe in a release. “To break the old record – set just last month – by that much and for the second month in a row, shows just how active it was.  We saw more areas throughout Hamilton in particular where homes sold at or above list price as an average – not just in isolated cases.”

His comments follow the release of numbers which show that 2,062 property sales were processed through the RAHB’s MLS system, which dismantled the record of 1,810 sales set just last month.

There were 2,526 properties listed in June, an increase of 12.9 per cent compared to the same month the year prior.  However, the increase in sales left the end-of-month listing inventory 12.2 per cent lower than last June.

The average price for a property in the Hamilton-Burlington area in June was $451,403, an increase of almost nine per cent from June 2014.

The rapid pace of sales, however, meant the available inventory at month's end fell to 3,698 properties, down 12.2 per cent from last year.

"We are deep into a sellers' market right now," he said. "The two main indicators are the sales-to-listing ratio, which is high at almost 85 per cent in the residential market, and months of inventory. Right now we have less than two months' inventory. That is extremely low when you consider that a balanced market has five to eight months of inventory."

Year-over-year sales in Hamilton increased 27.1 per cent, to 1,089 from 857, while listings rose 18.5 per cent to 1,285 from 1,084. The average price in the city rose 9.1 per cent to more than $368,000 from $337,480. The available inventory of properties sank 14 per cent to 1,416 from 1,646.

In Burlington, 438 properties were sold in June this year compared to 347 in the same month of 2014, a spike of 28.8 per cent. Average prices rose 7.2 per cent to $576,200 from $537,700.