Tag Archives: forest hill real estate
The king of King and Bathurst
Developer has his fingerprints on four projects
Excerpt from an article by Ellen Moorhouse – Toronto Star
Developer Peter Freed had been waiting for the house across the street from his eighth-floor office at 66 Portland St. to bite the dust.
Finally, the moment arrives. He jumps up to get a better view through a boardroom window, watching as the excavator’s jaws close on the gabled brick facade of the century-old building.
“There it goes. That will be all she wrote,” says Freed, 37, son of a Forest Hill real estate lawyer, a university dropout and now one of Toronto’s new generation of condo builders.
It’s amazing how fast Freed is rewriting the book for the neighbourhood near the King and Bathurst Streets area. Through his company, Freed Developments Ltd., he has four condo projects either built or underway within a couple of blocks: 20 Stewart St., 66 Portland St., where he has both his office and his penthouse living quarters, a condo–hotel at 550 Wellington St. and 455 Adelaide St.
The site where the house was demolished, however, will do more to raise Freed’s profile on the development scene than the four earlier projects put together.
That’s where he plans to build 75 Portland, a 212-unit condo, which will be the first Canadian project with interiors by world-famous French designer Philippe Starck.
This isn’t the first time Freed has gone to Europe for design talent. He hired Barcelona’s Estudio Mariscal for his condo-hotel project at 550 Wellington.
Starck promises to create something memorable in the huge courtyard and lobby for the 75 Portland project.
Freed, who partners with firms from Toronto and New York on his different condo and development projects, started trying to buy sites in the King and Bathurst Sts. area in 2000. He liked the neighbourhood and believed it was undervalued. Several years later, the work started to pay off; the owners approached him about selling.
A few seconds’ commute up one floor on the elevator from his office at 66 Portland St. lands Freed in his 3,400-square-foot penthouse. Walls of glass and sliding doors open to a 3,000-square-foot terrace.
He moved in just two months ago, but his tan suggests he must have had time to enjoy his stylish infinity lap pool and the elaborate outdoor decks and living areas.
Both exterior and interiors were designed by Cecconi Simone Inc., a firm that’s worked on a number of Freed’s projects. Wide plank floors and panelling add warmth to the spacious and sparsely furnished rooms, with polished concrete pillars.
Freed’s first construction experience came as a labourer in 1991 for a subdivision builder. In 1993, with partners, he built about 100 homes in Unionville, going out on his own in 1995 while the recession still lingered.
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Pricey homes ride out recession
From January to September, 1,706 GTA homes sold for more than $1 million, up slightly from the number in 2008. Most sold in the past three months.
Tony Wong
Selling million-dollar homes in the middle of a recession is a tough slog. But the market this time around has been less painful than in the past, say luxury realtors.
“Typically in a recession luxury homes are the first to dive in price and the last to recover,” says Toronto realtor Barry Cohen. “But apart from a bad winter, it looks like we haven’t really skipped a beat.”
Cohen sold a home on the Bridle Path for $11.8 million, the highest price for a resale home sold this year. And he currently has 22 homes listed for more than $1 million.
According to a report by ReMax Ontario Atlantic Canada released Tuesday, the market for million-dollar homes in the Greater Toronto Area was actually slightly stronger this year than last.
There were 1,706 luxury home sales of $1 million or over in the GTA in the nine months ending in September, compared with 1,687 sales last year, an increase of 1%. The bulk of those sales were made in the last quarter.
“A considerable shift is underway in the upper end,” says Michael Polzler, executive vice-president of ReMax. “Conditions are more balanced across the board.”
The luxury market still lags sales in the overall market, which are up 4.5% compared with last year. But no one thought many consumers would be buying luxury properties during the downturn.
During the first four months of this year, sales of luxury homes and condos were the hardest hit, as consumers retrenched.
The market came to life when stock markets staged a comeback earlier this year, along with promises of bonus cheques on Bay Street.
“That was the green light,” says Cohen. “You had the stock brokers and the fund managers coming back to the housing market.”
But it’s still a tenuous recovery. Most luxury sales are in the “entry-level” $1 to $1.5 million range.
Although there are 18 properties in Ontario listed at more than $10 million, luxury buyers are still cautious about entering the upper end of the market, also known as “super luxury.”
As a result traditional blue-chip neighbourhoods such as Rosedale and Forest Hill are seeing sales down from a year ago, while less prestigious neighbourhoods are gaining sales.
And unlike average homes, luxury homes aren’t flying out the door in a week.
Cohen has one York Mills-area home listed for almost $5 million. The 9,500-square-foot heritage home has seven bedrooms and sits on a lot of 0.4 hectares. It has been on the market for five months, and the original listing price was $5.5 million. It was probably best known as the millionaire’s home in Tommy Boy, a comedy starring Chris Farley, David Spade and Bo Derek.
The priciest home in Ontario is a $23 million, French-inspired chateau on the Bridle Path, built by developer Paul Miklas.
Most luxury markets are down globally. The big exception is some areas still experiencing growth, such as Asia. The largest sale of a residence has been in Hong Kong, where a condo recently went for $56.6 million (U.S.), or more than $11,000 per square foot. At just over 5,000 square feet, the condo was large, but not palatial, although the price certainly was.
In Toronto, it’s not hard to hit the million-dollar mark on what would be considered a modest-looking home in some neighbourhoods.
As a result, many of the million-dollar sales are happening away from the more expensive central core, as a million dollars doesn’t quite buy what it used to.
Areas like the Beach and Riverdale to the east are seeing record prices. The most expensive sale in the Beach this year was for $3.15 million. In Riverdale, the priciest listing is a historic home on a 33 feet by 360 feet lot for $3.89 million.
Young professionals trying to get more luxury bang for the buck have also moved up to Thornhill and Richmond Hill, which experienced the highest number of million-dollar home sales by neighbourhood.
In Oakville, a favourite with Bay Street bankers, prices were down by almost 20% earlier this year. But prices have bounced back: this year’s most expensive sale was a waterside home for $7 million.
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House prices skyrocket
Prices shoot up in Moore Park, Forest Hill, Deer Park
By Rob Roberts – National Post
Real estate prices skyrocketed last month in several tony north Toronto neighbourhoods, although analysts say the sharp rises appear to be an anomaly.
In Forest Hill and Moore Park, median resale prices shot up as much as $190,000 compared with August of last year — by far the steepest jumps reported in the city.
The C3 region, which includes much of Forest Hill, saw the median price rise to $580,000 from $420,0000 a year earlier. And in the C10 region, which includes parts of Moore Park and Deer Park, the price rose to $620,000 from $428,000.
Analysts say historically low mortgage rates, along with signs that the recession is easing, likely contributed to the jumps.
“C3 and C10 are pretty popular zones, so I imagine that increased market demand has played a role,” said Jason Mercer, senior manager of market analysis with the Toronto Real Estate Board.
Year-to-date numbers show much more modest changes. In C3, for example, the year-to-date median price sits at about $490,000, just $30,000 more than a year earlier. In C10, the opposite is true; despite the August surge, the year-to-date median price of $489,000 is still about $75,000 lower than a year earlier.
Throughout the Greater Toronto Area, the board’s latest data show sales jumped more than 27% from last August, with similar percentage increases in both the 416 and the 905. In the city, the board reported 3,109 sales; in the surrounding suburbs, 4,926.
The median resale home price in the GTA was $338,000 in August, an increase of $20,000 over the previous year.
In west and central Toronto, prices were up almost across the board, while in Scarborough and East York, many of the increases were only marginal.
The optimistic numbers may be seen as a sign that the municipal land transfer tax, which went into effect this year in the city of Toronto, has not been as detrimental to sales as some observers predicted. But Eva Bonomolo of Royal LePage says many clients are still concerned about the tax, and factor it into their budgets. They may “feel a little bit better” about it now because of rock-bottom interest rates, she noted.
“Toronto could be doing much better,” added Von Palmer, spokesman with the Toronto Real Estate Board. “We don’t know how much better Toronto could do if the land-transfer tax was non-existent.”
Comment: As much as I feared the Toronto Land Transfer Tax, it really has had no impact on my business. And obviously, with 3 record months in a row, overall Toronto real estate activity has not slowed. But can you imagine what would be going on if there was no TLTT?
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