With prop­erty prices in the GTA sky­rock­et­ing, 50% of con­dos are now sold to first-time buy­ers. How 700 square feet has changed a generation

By Leanne Delap – Toronto Life

John Downs, a 29-year-old reporter at AM640 Toronto Radio, and his girl­friend, Domini Clark, a 26-year-old food edi­tor at The Globe and Mail, met one night in 1999 at Whiskey Saigon while danc­ing to ’80s nos­tal­gia. They became friends, and a few months later, Downs asked Clark over to his place to watch TV. “I was stoked because he had cable,” says Clark, “so I put on fish­nets and sexy boots.” It was love dur­ing Who Wants to Be a Mil­lion­aire. “I didn’t know what was turn­ing me on more, the boots or the fact that she knew all the answers,” he says. After three years of dat­ing, it was pretty clear they were in it for the long haul. Downs worked out what his folks were drop­ping on his sister’s wed­ding and con­cocted a plan: “I decided to ask if they’d just give me the money to use as a down pay­ment. A home is more impor­tant to us than a party.”

Clark and Downs scoured the city for prop­er­ties and fell in love with Radio City—the town­houses and tow­ers then pro­posed for Mutual Street south of Welles­ley, on the site of the old CBC build­ing. As jour­nal­ists, they dug that it was all new but that the her­itage build­ings were going to be pre­served. They responded to the feel of the artist’s ren­der­ings (boho and orderly at the same time) and got chills in the sales cen­tre. But they couldn’t quite afford Radio City: for the 677-square-foot unit they cov­eted, on sale for $206,000, the devel­oper wanted some $40,000 down. Unde­terred, they whee­dled a spe­cial deal to pay in instal­ments, and a 20^th-floor suite was theirs. Stand­ing beside a mock-up in the show­room when it all became offi­cial, Clark was over­whelmed. “They put the bought sticker on the unit,” she says, “and I started crying.”

The cou­ple expected the build­ing to be ready 18 months after the Sep­tem­ber 2002 pur­chase, but con­struc­tion delays turned that into three years, time they spent cruis­ing other loft projects to keep that new-home buzz going (“We’re addicted to sales cen­tres,” Downs says). They loved the idea of cre­at­ing their unit, tile by tile, each upgrade care­fully assessed, cost ver­sus ben­e­fit. They even spent four months stalk­ing the per­fect kitchen faucet: in an open space, every detail counts.

Now, sev­eral months after they moved in, they’re hope­lessly house-proud in this, the first flush of own­er­ship. Lift­ing the bed to show off how clev­erly they’ve stored the board games beneath, Clark dis­lodges Mae, one of their two cats. Low­er­ing the bed, she care­fully smooths down the duvet. “We’re so excited to have a sec­ond room,” Downs adds, point­ing to the den–slash–guest space, “but we don’t really know what to do with it.”

“The nicest thing is the ceil­ing,” says Clark, look­ing up at the bare con­crete fin­ish. “I didn’t want stucco. That’s a waste of the nine-and-a-half-foot ceil­ings! Can you believe they made us pay $600 extra to leave it the way it was?” Downs and Clark wanted the most they could get out of their lit­tle box in the sky. And they aren’t alone.

Toronto has become condo city. Almost four of every 10 new homes sold in 2004 were con­do­mini­ums, up 13% since 2003. Afford­abil­ity is the fuel for this red-hot mar­ket, with inter­est rates still tempt­ing and prices drop­ping from the intense com­pe­ti­tion. Accord­ing to the Greater Toronto Home Builders’ Asso­ci­a­tion, the aver­age price for a new con­do­minium in the GTA is $288,587 ver­sus $387,369 for low-rise homes.

First-time buy­ers used to acquire older homes with the inten­tion of fix­ing them up. But now it’s hard to find a decent fixer-upper for $300,000. Accord­ing to a recent Cen­tury 21 Canada study on first-time home­buy­ers, this gen­er­a­tion is shy­ing away from costly ren­o­va­tions. Even if they can find some­thing cheap and unique, how many 28-year-olds have an extra $75,000 kick­ing around to redo the kitchen, knock down a few walls and prop up a sag­ging foundation?

Con­dos offer choice in their price range: there are 50,000 units in devel­op­ment through­out the GTA, rep­re­sent­ing more than 235 projects, some still at the draw­ing board stage, some near­ing com­ple­tion. And for the design-conscious and consumer-savvy condo gen­er­a­tion, there’s a unit for every cus­tomer. Build­ings today are per­son­al­ity statements.

Con­dos have made the most obvi­ous intru­sion downtown—the cor­ri­dor run­ning from the lakeshore to just below Bloor, from Cab­bage­town to the Exhi­bi­tion. These units attract a new breed of city dweller: young women and men (or, as mar­keters like to say, those who see them­selves as young) who are sin­gle and pro­fes­sional (they tend to have inter­est­ing and cre­ative careers), rarely own a car and marry late, if at all. They’re self-starters; they take risks, have free­dom and mobil­ity, and aren’t suf­fer­ing from too-much-stuff disease—at least from what you can see (many have gnarly stor­age lockers).

They want to be in the action; they groove on reclaimed urban areas (as opposed to the ster­ile park-underground units along Bay Street). They go out and use the city, mix­ing with like-minded con­sumers: there is a grow­ing café soci­ety around Queen West and King and Spad­ina in par­tic­u­lar, where restau­rants and night­clubs are within walk­ing dis­tance of prime loft zones. Gal­leries and hole-in-the-wall bars are sup­port­ing play­ers. Con­dos also breed second-hand stores, avant-garde bou­tiques and dog groomers.

The design­ers, mar­keters and builders know how to pitch that white-wall-and-Eames-chair fan­tasy, and they know exactly who will swal­low it. Each project is its own micro­cosm. From the out­side, buy­ers may seem sim­i­lar, but they cat­e­go­rize them­selves into tiny sub­sets where lit­tle details mean a great deal. I like Prada, you like punk, the guy down the road has eye­glasses with too much per­son­al­ity. These first-timers are doing what they have been pro­grammed to do: they are buy­ing brands.

It seems as if we’ve been sur­rounded by lofty liv­ing for­ever, but the phe­nom­e­non is actu­ally quite new. The brand­ing of con­dos grew out of the Toronto condo boom-bust expe­ri­ence. Back in the mid-’70s, when Harbourfront’s trans­for­ma­tion into a wall of glassed-in tow­ers began, indi­vid­ual build­ings dif­fer­en­ti­ated them­selves by offer­ing fin­ish­ing upgrades. In the ’80s, when gran­ite coun­ters, brass bath­room fix­tures and state-of-the-art appli­ances became stan­dard, big­ger, bet­ter, brag-worthy ameni­ties started to appear as the next sales focus. Gyms went mega; some places installed dri­ving ranges and offered concierge ser­vice. Then con­sumers real­ized the prices were becom­ing inflated for gew­gaws they’d never use.

For a few years after the mar­ket crash in 1987, peo­ple still thought prop­erty was a safe bet, so spec­u­la­tors con­tin­ued to buy. As with the day-trader phe­nom­e­non, sales had been dom­i­nated by ama­teurs flip­ping units. Then, finally, in the early ’90s, the condo mar­ket bot­tomed out. Inter­est rates soared. Investors lost their shirts, con­dos went on fire sale, devel­op­ers teetered, and banks lost their taste for hand­ing out fat mortgages.

In 1991 and 1992, devel­op­ers were forced to put down their hard hats. David Feld­man of Camrost-Felcorp was a big player at the time, hav­ing com­pleted the Marina Del Rey in Eto­bi­coke in 1989. “I had 1,000 units on my hands,” he says, refer­ring to build­ings like 10 Yonge Street and 10 Queens Quay West. “It was not pretty.” Other ambi­tious projects of the yup­pie era suf­fered the same fate, and con­dos sat empty. Swaths of indus­trial and com­mer­cially zoned lands remained boarded up. Then the artists came to squat. Back when the Jeff Sto­bers of the world were inflat­ing the high-tech bub­ble, artists hid their show­ers and hot plates and used com­mu­nal bath­rooms on Queen West. I remem­ber friends—artists and bar­tenders and PR girls—living in ille­gal lofts around that time. They flouted law and con­ven­tion and threw big after-hours parties.

In 1995, in regions like Scar­bor­ough and North York, con­dos started to be mar­keted to Asian buy­ers in antic­i­pa­tion of Hong Kong’s han­dover. Chi­nese immi­grants and investors, plan­ning against an uncer­tain future in Asia, began scoop­ing up pre­sale units across the 905. Mean­while, down­town devel­op­ers pres­sured the city to allow exper­i­men­tal bou­tique lofts. In 1996, then mayor Bar­bara Hall changed the zon­ing laws on indus­trial spaces and legal­ized loft liv­ing. Devel­op­ers began to talk about sell­ing the romance of Paris– or New York–style lofts. They were mar­ket­ing Prohibition-era glam­our. It worked for the same rea­son speakeasies work: every­one loves to be a scofflaw.

The pre­dom­i­nant condo design at the time was the wed­ding cake, the tiered and ter­raced units you see at Har­bourfront, or the stiff box-like con­struc­tions along Bay Street. One of the first projects to break that mould was 20 Nia­gara, com­pleted in 1998. Nia­gara was a mod­ernist vision of clean lines and sim­ple shapes, employ­ing indus­trial archi­tec­ture to make a new kind of res­i­den­tial space. That sounds like a cliché now that every­one is doing raw pip­ing and high ceil­ings, but back then it was rad­i­cal. Buy­ers will­ing to live in that new ultra-urban envi­ron­ment made out like ban­dits: the pent­house at 20 Nia­gara sold for $360,000 in 1996; it went for $937,500 in April of last year. (The units in the build­ing are still highly sought after—most never hit the open mar­ket because buy­ers line up in advance.)

A boarded-up build­ing at Queen and Stra­chan soon fol­lowed. It was mar­keted as the Candy Fac­tory, which started the local tra­di­tion of play­ing up indus­trial his­to­ries. Now there’s the Mer­chan­dise Build­ing Lofts, the Toy Fac­tory Lofts, Good­er­ham & Worts, the Massey Har­ris Lofts, the Tip Top Tai­lor Lofts. But there are only so many ware­houses to gut and retro­fit. To cash in on indus­trial chic, devel­op­ers built entirely new, from-the-ground-up projects with the aura of a con­ver­sion (known in the indus­try as “soft lofts“). Oth­ers used cutesy names like DNA (for “downtown’s next address”) or hard-to-swallow ones that evoke other locales, like the Mal­ibu (hov­er­ing over the not-so-scenic Stra­chan street­car dead end at the Ex) or French Quar­ter (on a bleak stretch of Jarvis).

Brad Lamb, the tall, bald reign­ing down­town condo king, is a fixture—both on garbage can adver­tise­ments and in restau­rants along King Street, his main strike zone. Now 44, he earned his realtor’s licence in ’88 and weath­ered the crash of the early ’90s. He leads a team of 18 agents who, he claims, sell $700 mil­lion worth of con­dos each year, some 1,800 units. “Toronto is on fire,” he tells me, wear­ing a skinny suit (no tie, slick), stand­ing on King West and look­ing out at his king­dom. Lamb says he likes hav­ing the young, hip first-timers as clients, because they gen­er­ally grow with him. “We get them sin­gle,” he says. “We get them when they move in with some­one. Then we get them when the rela­tion­ship breaks up.”

“The very best thing about liv­ing here is Olivier at Clafouti,” says Jane Tat­ter­sall, the 34-year-old gen­eral man­ager of AddVICE Mar­ket­ing, a com­pany that pro­motes such bands as Franz Fer­di­nand, Met­ric and Death Cab for Cutie, and hip cloth­ing lines such as G-SUS Indus­tries. She’s talk­ing about the cute pas­try shop on Queen Street, where Olivier mans the steamer. “He’s so pretty to look at. What a nice way to start the day, and you get a cap­puc­cino, too.”

When Tat­ter­sall hit 30, she decided she should get a grown-up place. She was liv­ing with sev­eral girl­friends in a sprawl­ing house on Dover­court, a post-grad hang­out that suited rau­cous par­ties. “I had an over­whelm­ing job, and I needed my life at home to be more peace­ful.” (She also dee­jays at Teatro restau­rant once a month.)

Fiercely inde­pen­dent, unsink­able right down to her ’70s-in-Gstaad ski bomber, she wasn’t going to wait for mar­riage to get her­self set up prop­erly in life. “I called my bank’s mort­gage guy and he came right to my house,” she says of her sud­den home-buying burst. “I wanted two floors, which is hard to find in a 700-square-foot loft.” And she wanted Queen West, too. She looked at a few places, then a friend called to say she was sell­ing her place in the Trin­ity Park Lofts, which she had lived in for only a few months. “It was brand new, right across from Trin­ity Bell­woods Park, and all ready to go; basi­cally, all I had to do was paint.”

She bought for $240,000 two years ago and loves it. “A lot of mod­els and actresses live here,” she says. “It’s pretty safe these days, not like a loft in a more warehouse-y part of town.” In fact, it’s almost totally gen­tri­fied, but neigh­bour­hood rep­u­ta­tions die hard. Oppo­site the park, there’s a groovy bike store and roman­tic gui­tar repair shop; across the way is Oys­ter Boy and the Swan, the feeder sta­tions for other nearby con­dos and lofts.

In the den off her bed­room, she has con­structed an iTunes zone, where she has been burn­ing her vast col­lec­tion of CDs. A giant can­dle adds a spicy patchouli fra­grance to the room; her bed­room win­dows are hung with gen­er­ous loops of red fab­ric. “And the closet! I can fit all my shoes, for the first time in my life.”

Still, she has a few things left to do. “Fur­ni­ture shop­ping is hard since I don’t want to buy the wrong thing. I’ve been look­ing for a cof­fee table for two years. The space feels big, but there isn’t a lot of room to jug­gle. That’s the thing about lofts. You think it’s going to be a box to fill. But it looks best when it looks empty.”

Hence the suc­cess of the inte­rior design firm Cec­coni Simone, the city’s lead­ing condo design­ers for the down­town projects. In charge of every­thing from research to mar­ket­ing to model suite dress­ing, and lobby and floor plan design, Elaine Cec­coni and Anna Simone are the Brian Gluck­stein of small spaces. They have some 15 projects under con­struc­tion, and another eight on draw­ing boards due to begin in the spring.

Respond­ing to the clean, stream­lined lofter’s dream, they used white pleather for their soft fur­nish­ings. Most of the hard pieces are based on a sim­ple cube that you can use in mul­ti­ples, adding or sub­tract­ing. “It is totally a scale issue,” says Cec­coni. “In less than 700 square feet, every­thing must be func­tional.” Plus, old things don’t work. “You can’t very well have a shabby-chic couch in a crisp loft,” Simone added. “And Cana­dian pine looks totally wrong.” Another thing they under­stand is the way young peo­ple use space. “Many peo­ple don’t need a din­ing room. They don’t use it. They eat in bed with their lap­tops. They need a tray.”

Three years ago, the duo opened a retail out­let below their design offices—on Dun­das West near Ossington—called Oni One. Lit­tle Por­tu­gal seemed an unlikely des­ti­na­tion for shop­pers look­ing for sleek new fur­ni­ture for their con­dos, but when the soar­ing white show­room rose out of the down-market row of wed­ding halls, dol­lar stores and caipir­inha pur­vey­ors, the Mini Cooper set with brand new pads to fur­nish fol­lowed. They stuffed their hatches with mod­ern plastic-crystal chan­de­liers, a monastery’s worth of can­dles, stack­ing trays and bright orange throws. “Some 95% of peo­ple who come to our store buy,” says Simone. “Our aver­age sale is $7,500.”

Their slo­gan is “My life is big­ger than 624 square feet,” and it hangs on a large, orange-print ban­ner just below their board­room. There, Cec­coni and Simone throw around the term “psychographics”—whereby crafty mar­keters try to sort con­sumers into lit­tle lifestyle cub­bies, human spec­i­mens neatly labelled by their con­sump­tion pref­er­ences. Essen­tially, it means they imag­ine every pos­si­ble detail about a cus­tomer before cre­at­ing a prod­uct. “We have learned that each block in this city, each side of each block, has a dif­fer­ent iden­tity,” says Cec­coni. “Peo­ple iden­tify them­selves with a dis­trict, then with a street within that dis­trict, then with a door­way on that street.”

To wit: peo­ple who buy at 20 Stew­art wear Yohji and Prada, are mem­bers of the Spoke Club and eat at Lee. Prospec­tive pur­chasers at Vü, where the Jarvis and Ade­laide Good­will used to be, ride bikes or take tran­sit. They love being east of Yonge, used to shop for vin­tage clothes at the Good­will; now they buy labels like Ben Sher­man from Del­phic on Queen West. They are avid gallery-goers and don’t do main­stream. They read I.D. Mag­a­zine and Wired and would like a Vespa. The buyer at The Bou­tique on Ade­laide is a lawyer open to a career shift; he—and it’s almost always a he—likes to paint, and so there is a lit­tle stu­dio off the bed­room in the model suite. He trav­els a lot, uses the building’s dry-cleaning and dog-walking ser­vices, and likes the idea of a pri­vate bar on the roof (no riff-raff here). He goes to Ultra Sup­per Club and dri­ves a 911 and is divorced with three kids. It sounds like extreme stereo­typ­ing, but Simone claims 80% of all buy­ers fit their pre­con­ceived psy­cho­graphic client profile.

The firm now employs 35 design­ers and has devo­tees across the coun­try (they’re open­ing a sec­ond store in Van­cou­ver) and beyond. They’re par­tic­u­larly pop­u­lar in com­pa­ra­bly sized U.S. cities, where devel­op­ers have only recently caught on to the idea of urban den­si­fi­ca­tion. The Cec­coni Simone firm has been com­mis­sioned by devel­op­ers to design Toronto-like lofts all over the States: Florida, New Jer­sey, Geor­gia, Ore­gon and Illi­nois. Because Toron­to­ni­ans have spent the past decade get­ting accus­tomed to the idea of cre­at­ing homes in high-rises, we have valu­able lessons to teach other cities about lush liv­ing in tiny spaces. Cec­coni Simone has even been hired to work on projects going up in Turks and Caicos, Dubai and China. “The loft thing is so huge,” Simone says. “Toronto is ahead of every­where else in the world on this.”

Young condo own­ers often have flex hours and work at home, which changes their rela­tion­ship to the city. Nolan Dubeau, a soft-spoken 29-year-old, runs his own inter­ac­tive busi­ness from home (graphic design and Web sites) and sub­con­tracts to oth­ers who do the same. He used to live in the east end, then two years ago bought a $316,000 two-storey unit in the Tecum­seth Lofts on King West, a clas­sic retro­fit build­ing that has just 28 units, each slightly dif­fer­ent from the oth­ers. Now he sits on the building’s board of direc­tors. He knows he won’t be on Tecum­seth for­ever and is very con­scious of resale. In fact, think­ing ahead is one rea­son he chose the build­ing: “When I bought the loft, I fig­ured there would be bet­ter resale in a project with such indi­vid­ual character.”

The suite is 1,200 square feet, with industrial-style railed stairs to the sec­ond floor and a cat­walk between bed­room and bath­room. His main floor is open, with his office right across from his couch—evidence that he works long hours. But even the most wired among us need some time away from the siren song of the Apple. Dubeau escapes his key­board two or three times a day by fre­quent­ing local bars, cafés and restau­rants like the Drake, the Bea­cons­field and Czehoski. “This area is ter­rific,” he says, and the condo is per­fect for him. He’ll stay as long as he can, prob­a­bly until he decides to have kids. Then he’d like to buy a house, ide­ally some­where down­town. But if nec­es­sary, he’ll stay put for a while, even with a fam­ily. A loft with a baby, he believes, is prob­a­bly “doable for a year or two.”

Other mem­bers of Dubeau’s demo­graphic are clearly think­ing along the same lines; they’re an acquis­i­tive bunch. Royal LeP­age pre­dicts that the rate of condo pur­chases among first-time buy­ers will dou­ble in the next three years. Maybe this is a sign that we’re matur­ing as a city, becom­ing more like New York, Rome or Paris, where liv­ing in apart­ments your whole life is con­sid­ered normal.

When 39-year-old Sid­ney McCain, a senior man­ager at V2 Records, moved from Man­hat­tan to Toronto to live with her boyfriend, Mike D’Abramo, she thought she’d be able to buy a house and was excited by the prospect. “Toronto is so strange to a New Yorker—all the lawns, all the three-storey single-family houses down­town.”

Mike D’Abramo is a 33-year-old man­ager of account ser­vices at Youthog­ra­phy, a com­pany that stud­ies trends in the tween and teen mar­kets. McCain met him when she flew into town in 2002 to pro­mote Spir­i­tu­al­ized, what she calls “an epic stoner band from the U.K.” Now the cou­ple are the enter­tain­ers of their cir­cle, host­ing all major hol­i­days, awards shows, even the Ken­tucky Derby. “If there’s an occa­sion,” she says, “we’ll find it.”

At first, they rented a 1,000-square-foot wide-open sin­gle room in the Kens­ing­ton Mar­ket Lofts, right in the heart of the mar­ket. But all their friends were buy­ing, and buy­ing is con­ta­gious; it spreads through groups of friends the way mar­riage and babies do. “We were pay­ing $1,700 a month, and we fig­ured we could get a mort­gage for less,” says McCain. They hit the pave­ment look­ing at houses but were dis­ap­pointed with the vari­ety in their price range.

Then they found a condo unit for sale at 150 Bev­er­ley, next to the Ital­ian Con­sulate, a par­tial con­ver­sion (the façade was the only part pre­served) from the mid-’80s. It cost $299,000 and was unloved. “Things were pretty run­down,” says D’Abramo. “The sky­light had a big hole in it, and the walls were painted brown.” But it was rel­a­tively big—900 square feet—and the rooms were more “tra­di­tional,” as in they had walls. “We wanted that,” he adds. “The open-concept Kens­ing­ton Mar­ket Loft was a lit­tle extreme for our lives.” When you come from some­where else, friends and fam­ily come to stay, and an open-concept loft is not the most com­fort­able space to share with Aunt Ida.

Their favourite fea­ture was the 700-square-foot patio—the kind of space almost never found in newer build­ings. “We could have the out­doors, too!” says D’Abramo. “We were plan­ning par­ties there before we even put in an offer!” So, like dreamy ren­o­va­tors every­where, they signed on the dot­ted line and dove in.

Given the last condo bust, when spec­u­la­tors lost their shirts, it’s hard to believe all this won’t end badly. In the GTA, there were approx­i­mately 16,000 condo unit sales in 2005, up some 25% from 2004. No other city in North Amer­ica has the vol­ume of sales that we do. But with so much of the mar­ket dri­ven by first-time buy­ers, demand could dis­si­pate. When the young condo buy­ers start hav­ing kids, they’ll need more space. Even large lofts aren’t con­ducive to rais­ing a fam­ily: the light will wake the baby, and while it might seem thrillingly uncon­ven­tional to let your tod­dler tri­cy­cle around indoors, when you have kids, you want some­where to hide.

And yet Jeanhy Shim, the edi­tor of Urba­na­tion, an indus­try quar­terly that tracks the Toronto condo mar­ket, isn’t wor­ried. When those lofters move out, oth­ers will move in. She believes there’s no rea­son to expect an early ’90s–style crash. Because spec­u­la­tors fuelled the mar­ket then, units flipped sev­eral times before any­one pulled up with their U-Haul. Shim esti­mates that only about one-fifth of units are now pur­chased for invest­ment pur­poses. The rest are sold to “real” buy­ers, who want to live in their con­dos. In the last boom, 50% of sup­ply was unsold; today the num­ber of unsold units on the mar­ket hov­ers around 22%. Another dif­fer­ence is that though unit prices are ris­ing, they’re doing so mod­er­ately: only 24% in five years. You might even say that there are bar­gains out there: in 1989, at the height of the last boom, square footage sale prices were $425; today they are firm at $330.

Julie Di Lorenzo, pres­i­dent of the Greater Toronto Home Builders’ Asso­ci­a­tion, is equally opti­mistic. She started out as a con­struc­tion con­trac­tor when she was 18 and is now a part­ner at Dia­mante Devel­op­ment Corp. (the com­pany that built 1 Bal­moral, 2 Rox­bor­ough and the Roy­al­ton at Bay and Col­lege, and is now work­ing on 1 City Hall, which will be ready for occu­pancy in June). “With immi­gra­tion ris­ing, land is going to run out,” she says. “There is so much com­pe­ti­tion that buy­ing a condo within the city of Toronto is the oppor­tu­nity of a gen­er­a­tion.” Looks like the gen­er­a­tion is listening.

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Con­tact the Jef­frey Team for more information