Hi there. In this finance blog post, I would like to talk about the crazy real estate market in the Toronto and surrounding area.
References:
- https://wowa.ca/toronto-housing-market
- https://www.quandl.com/data/CMHC/HPPU50_ON-Average-Median-and-Price-Percentiles-for-Unabsorbed-Homeowner-and-Condominium-Units-Provinces-Ontario
One Year Ago - Moved To Just East Of Toronto
It has been one year since my brother and I stopped renting a nice basement apartment in the North York area of Toronto. We moved back home with the parents to a new and smaller home east of Toronto. Toronto housing prices are just overpriced and unaffordable. Housing prices west of Toronto near the Toronto Pearson Airport area are too high as well. On top of the high prices, the bidding wars were insane as winning bids were above listing prices and no seller would take an offer that includes a home inspection. It made sense at the time to go for a home east of Toronto as it was more affordable.
One year ago, the listing of the home I am in now was $599, 000 CAD. Our winning bid was $681, 000 CAD which beat out the second highest bid by one thousand dollars. Crazy.
Moving to now, housing prices in my local area have gone up. It is getting out of hand. About a week ago, one listing two houses away from where I am was listed at $799, 000 CAD. This was sold over asking for $975, 000 CAD. Another house in the neighbourhood was listed at $839, 000 CAD and was supposedly sold at $1, 750, 000 CAD. This particular house was not like a mansion or anything. It is just a detached family home. It is not known who these buyers are and if they moved out of Toronto to outside of Toronto.
Ontario Province Still A Seller's Market
I have done quick research on housing prices for Toronto and the Ontario province. The screenshot images below are from the References websites.
According to wowa.ca, Toronto is still a seller's market. There are more buyers than sellers which would drive up prices. In Toronto the average selling price of a listing is just over one million CAD + taxes. Here is wowa.ca's Market Report Summary.
Market Report Summary
Updated March 3rd, 2021
- Toronto remains a seller's market and home sales are close to record highs for the month, up by 51% from Feb. 2020
- Average sold prices increased by 15% year-over-year to $1.04M
- Detached home prices increased by 23% year-over-year to $1.37M
- Semi-detached home prices increased by 20% year-over-year to $1.05M
- Condo apartment prices dropped by 4% year-over-year to $642K
You can also find free and public information about Canadian housing market data through the Quandl financial database website. The link is here for the province of Ontario. I was planning on including a screenshot but I had trouble uploading it. It is better to click on the link and play around with the graph.
In the Quandl link page with the 3 year time window and turning on the average and median prices you can see that average home prices are higher than median housing prices. Really expensive homes drives the average much higher and does not affect the median that much. Note that the median is right in the middle. In this case, half of the prices are above the median price and half of the prices are below the median price.
Maybe 3D Printed Houses Could Help
I am aware of the existence of 3D houses that are being built. It is not known from as far as I know if there are 3D houses in the Toronto area or in my Ontario province. We could use more affordable housing and/or a greatly supply of homes to drive prices down.
Another problem I see is that too many people want to be in the Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver areas. This is where most of the good jobs, retail stores and entertainment places are. The other areas outside of those three locations are not as developed.
I think having 3D printed houses can help drive down prices but building up other lesser known cities and their infrastructure would help attract people away from Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
Thank you for reading.