For­est Hill, Bri­dle Path hottest spots for real estate worth $1 million-plus as Feb­ru­ary sales, prices soar

Tony Wong – Toronto Star

In her search for a new home, Jean Ride­out bud­geted what she thought was an “ample” fig­ure – $1 mil­lion. But the Toronto woman quickly found there was a yawn­ing dis­con­nect between her idea of what an upscale prop­erty should be and what she would even­tu­ally find in the city’s bet­ter neighbourhoods.

“I didn’t expect a palace. But you’re not even get­ting park­ing in some areas for that price. I guess a mil­lion dol­lars doesn’t go as far as it used to,” Ride­out, an exec­u­tive with a telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pany, said with a laugh.

A heated Toronto real estate mar­ket is lift­ing sales of lux­ury homes as the econ­omy starts to improve and move-up buy­ers regain con­fi­dence, says a report by Cold­well Banker Ter­re­quity Realty released Wednesday.

The top-performing area with sale prices in excess of $1 mil­lion in 2009 was For­est Hill, where 280 homes changed hands at an aver­age price of $1.42 million.

The Bri­dle Path area was in sec­ond place, with 221 sales and an aver­age price of $2.1 million.

Oakville, west of Toronto, came in third with 174 prop­er­ties sold with an aver­age value of $1.67 million.

Ride­out con­cen­trated her search in the Beach and Bloor West Vil­lage neigh­bour­hoods of Toronto, areas far less toney than the Bri­dle Path or For­est Hill. But mul­ti­ple offers and bid­ding wars have made the jour­ney a frus­trat­ing one.

“We’re not look­ing for per­fec­tion, but it’s silly when so many peo­ple are lined up bid­ding for what is really a very mod­est home for a very high price,” said Rideout.

Ana­lysts say the spring mar­ket looks like it will remain heated, as both first-time buy­ers and move-up buy­ers like Ride­out enter the mar­ket before inter­est rates rise in the sec­ond half of the year.

Exist­ing home sales in the Toronto area were up by 77% in Feb­ru­ary com­pared with the same time last year, accord­ing to fig­ures released Wednes­day by the Toronto Real Estate Board.

The board said 7,291 homes changed hands last month from 4,120 homes in Feb­ru­ary of 2009.

The aver­age price of a home was also up by 19% to $431,509.

“Increases in exist­ing home sales and aver­age price were noted across the GTA in lowrise and higrise home types,” said TREB pres­i­dent Tom Lebour.

“This sug­gests that first-time, move-up and down­siz­ing buy­ers are all active in the exist­ing home marketplace.”

Com­par­isons with the first half of last year are slightly mis­lead­ing because that was the bot­tom of the mar­ket, cau­tion analysts.

The Canada Mort­gage and Hous­ing Corp. released a fore­cast this week that the mar­ket will remain hot for the first half of the year, before trend­ing down in the sec­ond half and into 2011.

One bright spot for buy­ers is that list­ings improved by a sig­nif­i­cant 24% in Feb­ru­ary com­pared with last year.

“Annual growth in new list­ings is expected to con­tinue,” said Jason Mer­cer, TREB’s senior man­ager of mar­ket analysis.

“New list­ings growth will start to out­strip sales growth as we move through 2010,” he said.

“As the mar­ket becomes bet­ter sup­plied, we will see more sus­tain­able single-digit rates of growth.”

Homes are still being snapped up because of a lack of sup­ply. The aver­age home is on the mar­ket for 22 days before being sold, com­pared with 45 days last year.

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