Tag Archives: market trend
Toronto home sales slip
The Canadian Press
Toronto home sales in July slipped 1.5% compared with a year ago as sales of condominium apartments fell 10%, the city’s real estate board said.
Comment: And yet again, someone needs to explain that sales always dip in the summer. The past few years have been crazy, so we have all forgotten what normal is. But fewer sales through the summer months, when people are away, is totally normal. Let’s see what happens in the fall – in things do not take off as usual, then we have a problem.
Overall, the board reported Friday 7,570 homes sold last month compared with 7,683 a year ago.
Comment: And things do need to be put in perspective – people are calling for the collapse of the Toronto real estate market over 113 sales. Take a moment and think about, 113 fewer sales does not signify an entirely new housing market trend.
Sales of condos slipped to 1,753 for the month, as detached and semi-detached home sales dropped 2% and 4%, respectively. Townhouse sales jumped 15%.
Board president Ann Hannah said new mortgage lending guidelines and the additional cost of the Toronto land transfer tax prompted some to put their buying decision on hold.
Comment: Could be the new mortgage rules, though they truly affect maybe 5% of buyers. More likely is the summer weather. or both.
“Very strong annual sales growth in the first half of 2012 and an earlier peak in sales this spring compared to 2011 help explain more moderate sales this summer,” Hannah said in a statement.
Comment: True enough, there were a LOT of sales in the first part of the year.
In Toronto, the average selling price in July was $476,947, up 4% from a year ago, while the MLS home price composite index was up 7.1% year-over-year.
Comment: As long as prices keep rising, we are not turning to a buyers’ market. But if sales continue to slide as listings rise, we may actually see something chance. But for all of you waiting for prices to fall, since 1966 there have only ever been 4 years where prices fell – all related to the bubble of the late 1980s and recession of the early 1990s.
New listings totalled 13,888 for the month, up from 12,407 a year ago.
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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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Will condos outpace low-rise?
Lisa Van de Ven – National Post
High-rise sales are down. Low-rise sales are up. But do the new-home sales numbers for February mean the end of one market trend and the beginning of another?
Low-rise made up approximately 65% of the new-home market in February, according to numbers released by RealNet Canada. New high-rise sales plummeted by 59% across the Greater Toronto Area from February 2011, with only 913 units sold. Low-rise sales, meanwhile, improved by 16.2% GTA-wide, with 1,666 units sold.
It’s a dramatic switch from last year, which saw condo sales make up 62% of the total new-home market.
While one insider expects the high-rise market to level off, he doesn’t think condo sales will leave low-rise in their dust like they did last year: “We think we’re going to be at a 50/50 split this year,” says Joe Vaccaro, acting president of the Building Industry and Land Development Association (BILD). “There are a number of low-rise projects coming to the market, and there’s a great demand for low-rise family housing, so that’s what we think will happen this year.”
Low-rise lands that were formerly caught up in the municipal approvals process are now seeing the light of day, he adds, meaning there are new places to build, at least in the short term. Just don’t expect it to be a long-term trend, says Jasmine Cracknell, partner with Toronto real estate consulting firm N. Barry Lyon Consultants. While she sees low-rise and high-rise switching back and forth over the next few years, each taking turns to take the lead in new-home sales, eventually there’s only one winner. “I think after the five-year mark in the GTA, there just won’t be any more low-rise land, and from that point it will just be high-rise that dominates,” she says.
As far as this year goes, both Mr. Vaccaro and Ms. Cracknell suggest high-rise sales won’t stay as low as they were in February. There were fewer project launches early this year — which, Ms. Cracknell says, is actually a normal occurrence during the winter but one that was interrupted last year thanks to the busier-than-normal market.
With approximately 40 condo projects scheduled to be released by the end of June — and more than 100 by the end of the year — Mr. Vaccaro says the GTA should expect to see new-condo sales numbers rise, though still below last year’s. “It’s stabilizing — showing some stability both on the low-rise side, where we seem to have found a natural trend line, and then on the high-rise side, I think it’s stabilizing as to where it will probably be in terms of current market conditions and the launches coming forward,” he says.
Ms. Cracknell agrees. “It’s not this drastic decline, it’s more just returning back to normal conditions.”
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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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- The shift to condos is on There were 3,159 high-rise units sold across the GTA in...
- Rise Condos was built from the barber’s chair up Some of Toronto's coolest condo projects started with chats over...
