Toronto will always remain far more expensive to try and buy a home in than elsewhere in Ontario, but the appalling extent to which this is true has been outlined in a new study.
To put the price disparities between GTA cities and cheaper places like Sudbury or Thunder Bay into perspective, listing site Point2Homes looked at what one could get on a budget of $400k across the province — a figure selected to represent what the “typical Ontario homebuyer” might be able to afford.
And, of course, the findings were a punch in the gut to anyone hoping to live in and around T.O.
Noting that the price of the average Ontario home is around $856k — down from an even higher peak of nearly $930k in May — Point2 says that most properties are still “very much out of the financial league of at least half the buyers in Toronto, not to mention the less expensive cities in the province,” even with this year’s slight price drops.
Driving this point home is how much square footage someone with $400k to spend on a home could actually get around the province, starting with a meagre 395 square feet in Toronto.
This would be the size of a smaller micro-condo, if a buyer can even find one available, though even those often start at $500k in the downtown core.
Of course, downtown Toronto has the highest price per square foot in Ontario, with a very low chance of finding any listing for $400k. Chart from Point2Homes.
(There is one listing right around $400k in Birchcliffe-Cliffside, which was only reduced to this price after a lack of interest and numerous terminated listings.)
Moving to less exorbitant locales in Ontario, there are parts of the GTA like Vaughan, Markham, and Richmond Hill, where a $400k budget could buy you a cramped 494, 516 and 546 square feet of space, respectively.
For the same price, you could nab 599 square feet in Mississauga, 640 in Pickering, or 664 in Brampton, the latter of which is finally in “average one-bedroom size” territory.
One can get nearly three times as much space in Thunder Bay as they can in downtown T.O.. Chart from Point2Homes.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have somewhere like Thunder Bay, where you can get three times more space than in Toronto for the same amount of money. In the more northerly community, one could ostensibly get a place with 1,325 square feet of space for $400k.
Chatham-Kent is similarly cheap, with a price of $370 per square foot to downtown Toronto’s $1,013, giving you a 1,081-square-foot home for $400k.
The same can be said for Greater Sudbury ($400 a square foot, or 1,000 square feet of space for $400k), Kingston ($421 a square foot/950 square feet for that price) and London ($425 a square foot/941 square feet), by Point2’s data.
“Even Ottawa — where the average home price is hovering around $600k — offers more than double the space available to the typical Toronto buyer,” the group writes.
“That’s because the price per square foot in the country’s capital is below $500, whereas Toronto stands in a league of its own with an average price per square foot of more than $1k … As long as buyers are willing to stay away from Toronto, they could get much more living space for the same amount.”
They add that “although the benchmark home price in all the cities surrounding Toronto is above $1 million — with Richmond Hill, Vaughan, Markham and Oakville even surpassing Ontario’s most populous and popular city — they all offer more space for $400k than Toronto.”
TORONTO – One expert predicts Ottawa‘s changes to mortgage rules will help spur demand among potential homebuyers but says policies aimed at driving new supply are needed to address the “core issues” facing the market.
The federal government’s changes, set to come into force mid-December, include a higher price cap for insured mortgages to allow more people to qualify for a mortgage with less than a 20 per cent down payment.
The government will also expand its 30-year mortgage amortization to include first-time homebuyers buying any type of home, as well as anybody buying a newly built home.
CIBC Capital Markets deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal calls it a “significant” move likely to accelerate the recovery of the housing market, a process already underway as interest rates have begun to fall.
However, he says in a note that policymakers should aim to “prevent that from becoming too much of a good thing” through policies geared toward the supply side.
Tal says the main issue is the lack of supply available to respond to Canada’s rapidly increasing population, particularly in major cities.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 17,2024.
OTTAWA – The Canadian Real Estate Association says the number of homes sold in August fell compared with a year ago as the market remained largely stuck in a holding pattern despite borrowing costs beginning to come down.
The association says the number of homes sold in August fell 2.1 per cent compared with the same month last year.
On a seasonally adjusted month-over-month basis, national home sales edged up 1.3 per cent from July.
CREA senior economist Shaun Cathcart says that with forecasts of lower interest rates throughout the rest of this year and into 2025, “it makes sense that prospective buyers might continue to hold off for improved affordability, especially since prices are still well behaved in most of the country.”
The national average sale price for August amounted to $649,100, a 0.1 per cent increase compared with a year earlier.
The number of newly listed properties was up 1.1 per cent month-over-month.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
MONTREAL – Two Quebec real estate brokers are facing fines and years-long suspensions for submitting bogus offers on homes to drive up prices during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Christine Girouard has been suspended for 14 years and her business partner, Jonathan Dauphinais-Fortin, has been suspended for nine years after Quebec’s authority of real estate brokerage found they used fake bids to get buyers to raise their offers.
Girouard is a well-known broker who previously starred on a Quebec reality show that follows top real estate agents in the province.
She is facing a fine of $50,000, while Dauphinais-Fortin has been fined $10,000.
The two brokers were suspended in May 2023 after La Presse published an article about their practices.
One buyer ended up paying $40,000 more than his initial offer in 2022 after Girouard and Dauphinais-Fortin concocted a second bid on the house he wanted to buy.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2024.
