Toronto housing market showing no signs of cooling
New detached homes selling for $1.8M in April: Report
FINANCIAL POST
TORONTO — Prices for new homes in the Greater Toronto Area continue to rise despite provincial measures to cool the sector, according to new data from the Building Industry and Land Development Association.
It may still be too early to tell what impact the provincial changes, including a 15 per cent non-resident speculation tax, will have on the market, but the numbers from April show there is still a supply shortage in and around Canada’s biggest city.
The average price of a new lowrise, single-family home, which includes detached, semi-detached and townhomes, was up 40 per cent from a year ago to $1,212,297 in April. In March, the average price was $1,124,600. In the detached segment, the average asking price across the GTA was $1,810,232 last month, an increase from $1,783,417 in March.
“Builders are not able to keep up with the demand for new housing,” said Bryan Tuckey, chief executive of Toronto-based BILD. “The product that builders are able to bring to the market is quickly purchased and prices for all types of new homes keep increasing as a result.”
Altus Group, which supplies the data for BILD, said 4,680 new homes sold in the GTA last month, an increase of seven per cent from a year ago.
During the first four months of the year, 17,977 new homes were sold, an increase of 24 per cent from the same period a year earlier and 48 per cent above the 10-year average for the month.
“The supply of new homes, the number of homes available to buyers in builders’ inventories at the end of the month, continued its unabated decline,” BILD said. Industry groups have complained that the new provincial rules do little to deal with the underlying problem in the market which they say is a lack of supply brought on by restrictive government rules.
In a decade of data, BILD and ALTUS Group said overall inventory has never dropped below 10,000 until April, when it slipped to 9,387 new homes. A year ago, there were 21,056 new homes available for purchase in builders’ inventories.
Prices for new multi-family homes, condo apartments in highrise and mid-rise buildings and stacked townhomes, also shot up 24 per cent from a year ago. The average price of available units was $570,226 in April and $685 per square foot with average unit size of 832 square feet.
Prices for condo apartments rose because the average price per square foot was up 17.5 per cent from a year ago, but also because the average size of condominiums continues to rise as consumers look to different housing options.
“The declining number of new homes available to purchase is not a question of less product being brought to market,” says Patricia Arsenault, executive vice-president of research consulting services with Altus Group. “There were more than 11,000 units in projects opened in the first four months of this year — that’s about one-third higher than the average for the previous two years. But new product is selling well. For example, for projects opened in the first quarter of this year, only one in five units were still available to purchase at the end of April; for the same period in 2015, that proportion was about double (two in five).”