LACKIE: Keep an eye on condo prices in coming months
For all the talk of Toronto’s bananas pandemic real estate market, one might simply assume this wild market has been uniformly on the rise since the early days of the post-lockdown reawakening.
With the average price of all property types in the GTA now nearly 20% higher than last year, that year-over-year increase is simply the average. Detached homes, for instance, are actually up 28% from this time last year, while townhouses have risen 45%.
By and large, those increases have been in-step with one another, the market pretty consistently gaining speed and momentum since spring 2020 with a few minor blips along the way.
The condo market, up 30%, has been a different ride entirely, comprised instead of peaks and valleys, valleys and peaks. And as once-unaffordable Toronto is now almost prohibitively so, condominiums are what we should be watching in the weeks and months to come.
Was the market headed for a perpetual freefall? Would downtown be dead forever? Was this it?
When even single-family homes were languishing in the early days of lockdown, it was almost unfathomable to me that condos could come out of this unscathed. Surely the pandemic would trigger a revaluation of the way we live and density was going to be undesirable. How could people not balk at shared elevators, communal amenities, and compact floorplans after abruptly moving to an indefinite work-from-home model?
