Alli­son Lam­pert – The Gazette

When­ever there’s a big national story on the spec­tre of a tidal wave of plung­ing resale prices, empty con­dos and fore­clo­sures turn­ing major Cana­dian hous­ing mar­kets into ghost towns, the epi­cen­tre of the impend­ing col­lapse always seems to be in either Toronto or Vancouver.

Com­ment: Which is funny, since Toronto is not col­laps­ing and Van­cou­ver has been for years.

So when recent opin­ion pieces warned of “signs of another bust in the mak­ing” – that the num­ber of homes for sale in Greater Mon­treal on the Mul­ti­ple List­ing Ser­vice now sur­passed active list­ings in Van­cou­ver and Toronto com­bined, the fig­ures were startling.

Equally sur­pris­ing were fig­ures show­ing dou­ble the num­ber of con­dos for sale on the MLS (or on the Cen­tris list­ing sys­tem in Que­bec) in Greater Mon­treal as in Greater Toronto — the largest real estate mar­ket in the coun­try, which has more con­dos under con­struc­tion than any­where else in North America.

“Mon­treal is actu­ally where the great­est supply-demand imbal­ance cur­rently exists,” ana­lyst Ben Rabidoux wrote Wednes­day in The Globe and Mail.

Com­ment: Which is com­ing from some­one almost as neg­a­tive as Garth Turner!

While active list­ings in the Mon­treal condo mar­ket, direct com­par­isons between the num­ber of homes for sale in the two cities have come under fire.

Com­ment: You can­not com­pare them, two dif­fer­ent cities. And you can­not com­pare either to Vancouver.

In a response Wednes­day, the Que­bec Fed­er­a­tion of Real Estate Boards chal­lenged the argu­ment that there were more con­dos for sale in Mon­treal than in Toronto, cit­ing the dis­par­ity in hous­ing starts between the two cities.

There are now 51,000 con­dos under con­struc­tion in Greater Toronto, com­pared to 12,600 in Greater Mon­treal, the fed­er­a­tion said, cit­ing Canada Mort­gage and Hous­ing Corp. data. As of Jan­u­ary, 20,800 of those con­dos in Toronto have yet to be sold, com­pared to 5,800 units in Mon­treal, wrote Paul Car­di­nal, the federation’s direc­tor for mar­ket analy­sis cit­ing data from research firms in both cities.

Com­ment: There are actu­ally 61,000 con­dos under con­struc­tion in Toronto right now.

“Right there, that’s about four times less than in Toronto,” Car­di­nal wrote.

Com­ment: And with about 3.3x as many peo­ple in Toronto, for Mon­treal to have 1/4 the con­dos makes a lot of sense. The scale is right.

“It’s clear that there are far more con­dos for sale in Greater Toronto than in Greater Mon­treal. So we can­not con­firm that sup­ply is more prob­lem­atic in (Mon­treal) than in Toronto.”

What’s more, the Toronto Real Estate Board tracts data sep­a­rately for condo apart­ments and condo town­houses, while in Mon­treal, those num­bers are com­piled in one cat­e­gory for all types of con­dos. Yet most of the com­par­isons between the cities include all 12,623 con­dos for sale in Mon­treal last month, but only cite the 6,123 condo apart­ments in Toronto, which make up the major­ity of the active list­ings in that category.

In March, there were about 1,000 condo town­houses for sale in Toronto, data from TREB show.

But while the com­par­i­son may not be two to one, there is still a gap in the active list­ings between the two cities.

Either way, it’s clear that sup­ply is ris­ing in Greater Mon­treal, where the condo mar­ket now favours buy­ers for the first time in 15 years with March inven­tory up 25% to 12,623 units, com­pared to the same month in 2012.

Com­ment: Same as Toronto, sell­ers have ruled the roost for a long time.

While cer­tain Mon­treal condo projects have already sold out, some devel­op­ers are now giv­ing away cars, rais­ing bro­kers’ com­mis­sions and run­ning spe­cial pro­mo­tions to sell units. And on Sat­ur­day, the down­town Mon­treal condo tower Avenue is hold­ing a sale where buy­ers can get higher-floor apart­ments for the same price as units on lower levels.

For Mon­treal buy­ers, it doesn’t take a com­par­i­son with Toronto to know that choices abound these days in the city’s condo market.

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Con­tact the Jef­frey Team for more infor­ma­tion – 416−388−1960

Lau­rin & Natalie Jef­frey are Toronto Real­tors with Cen­tury 21 Regal Realty.
They did not write these arti­cles, they just repro­duce them here for peo­ple
who are inter­ested in Toronto real estate. They do not work for any builders.
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down­town mon­treal con­do­mini­ums on draw­ing board

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