Thank you very much.
I'm going to turn to Mr. Taylor, but first of all, I would really like to thank Ms. Corriveau and Ms. McGee for talking about the continuum as we're looking at it. When I look at housing, I look at the whole thing and the impact in terms of that simple physics measure that whenever there is one action, you're going to get the opposite reaction as well. I look at that, and when we're talking about housing and homelessness, we also have to look at the other end.
However, my major concern right now is in the middle of this continuum. From some statistics I was looking at from the CREA, the Canadian Real Estate Association, one of the greatest concerns I have right now is about supply. Right now, housing inventory is at a 16-year low, and in my community it's at about 1.1 months of inventory, when we should be having averages of between five and eight months of inventory. This is just way out. The average cost of a house in Canada right now is $571,500. We know that it's gone up. Of course, there were going to be people wanting to get into the market, so we were expecting a bit of a boom, with sales going up by 26% in the month of July. I'm really concerned about the impact and I'm just going to tell you a little story about my own community.
Though I know that people who live in Toronto love having Mr. Vaughan there, they like to move to my community where they get a more affordable house, a variety of different things, especially with COVID. We have backyards, we have so many great things, but we're seeing the price of housing going up. Just recently a house that was on sale for $289,000 went over the asking price by $83,000. That's almost a 33% increase. That's what we're seeing in my community, especially for first-time homebuyers, for the people tyring to get into the housing market.
What do you think the federal government needs to do, or what are some of things we should be aware of as we're moving forward, knowing that we have low inventory and that first-time homebuyers are being pushed out of the market because we're seeing such high prices right now? Knowing the financial turbulence facing many people right now, how are they going to be able to get a mortgage?