GOING SPLITS
Interest in co-ownership — buying a home with another purchaser and sharing the living space, and the spoils — is on the rise in Ontario
When Graywood Developments launched sales of the 458 units in its JAC Condos on Jarvis Street across from Allen Gardens in 2021, much of the tower was reserved for threeand four-bedroom suites and townhomes “designed specifically with families in mind,” says vice-president of sales Kaleigh Kelly.
But an unexpected trend has emerged among the purchasing pool. In addition to family buyers, “we’re seeing a lot of interest among friends and young professionals who are looking to get into the real-estate market by buying larger units together,” Kelly says. “This kind of co-ownership wasn’t really on our radar when the suites were designed, but it’s turning out to be a great way for first-time homebuyers to get their foot in the door and start to build equity.”
According to a 2024 policy brief by Karen Chapple and Ahmad Al-musa of the University of Toronto’s School of Cities, “people are increasingly buying single-family homes together and transforming them into multiple units, with each family owning a separate unit on the property,” in response to the lack of affordable housing in Ontario, particularly for first-time homebuyers.
A 2023 Royal Lepage survey conducted by Leger found that six per cent of Canadian homeowners already co-own their property with another party who is not their spouse or significant other. Of this group, 89 per cent said they co-own with family members, seven per cent with friends, and another eight per cent with someone who is neither friend nor family. At the same time, 21 per cent of respondents to a newer Re/max survey conducted by Leger, in 2024, said they would consider co-owning a home with a family member who isn’t their spouse or partner. Meanwhile, data from Statistics Canada shows upticks in residential property buyers “in a group of three or more” from 2018 to 2020 in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Manitoba, B.C. and the Yukon.
“Many Canadians are facing affordability hurdles, yet their home ownership goals remain strong,” says Re/max Canada president Christopher Alexander. “As a result, people are exploring alternative avenues to enter the housing market, especially when the conventional model of individual or couple ownership with a down payment ranging from five to 20 per cent is no longer viable.”
In some cases, co-ownership arrangements don’t involve cohabitation, Alexander says; rather, the co-owning residents pay the equivalent of rent for their portion of the home to the other co-owners. This approach is the basis of the business model underpinning Toronto-based Key Living Corp., which enables “aspiring owners,” as the company calls them, to make “rent-like payments” while building equity in a home that they can one day choose to purchase or sell.
In terms of new housing development, co-owner cohabitation is supported by projects across the GTA. In Unionville, for instance, Minto Communities’ Park & Main project includes “flex plans” that can yield as many as six bedrooms per two-storey townhome. A third of the floor plans for Concert Properties’ 53-storey Burke Condos feature three bedrooms, with the largest spanning 2,091 square feet. Now under construction at Dundas Street West and Dupont Avenue, Junction Point includes 11 three-bedroom units, while more than 90 per cent of the 44 condos at 1414 Bayview, also in pre-construction, feature two or three bedrooms.
The townhomes at JAC Condos allow co-purchasers to spread either three or four bedrooms over two floors above a common kitchen and living space at grade. “Based on what we’re seeing with JAC, our future projects will definitely be taking into consideration how we can lay out larger units to emphasize separate spaces,” Kelly says, citing features like ensuite bathrooms, enclosed staircases and roomier bedrooms.
In terms of bylaws and policies, however, Ontario is less supportive of co-ownership than Quebec and British Columbia, and states like Washington, Texas and California, all of which have made co-ownership easier to enter into. As it stands, the School of Cities’ Chapple and Al-musa write, the process of co-purchasing multiple units on a single lot in Ontario “remains lengthy, complex and fraught with risk.”
For one thing, the pair notes, a lack of standardized co-ownership agreements increases legal costs, with poorly drafted documents posing risks, particularly in dispute situations. For another, challenges arise in selling or transferring coowned property, with shared liability for the mortgage meaning that if one person defaults, the other co-owners must cover the defaulted obligations and payments. Financing also presents a “significant barrier” to co-ownership owing to mortgage insurers’ reluctance to cover co-owned properties.
In the wake of the Ontario government’s refusal to force municipalities to allow fourplexes on residential land, and after the province’s new Cutting Red Tape to Build More Homes Act included no new provisions for co-ownership, NDP housing critic and University-rosedale MPP Jessica Bell is publicly calling on the Ford government to “come up with a plan to make it easy and inexpensive for people to pool their savings, buy a property together, move into their own individual home, and share common areas.”
These co-owned properties, Bell says, can take the form of a condominium where each household owns their part of the home and has their own mortgage, and common areas are shared. Another option would involve a “severed” property in which a section, such as a laneway suite, is sold off as a separate home. With the City of Toronto estimating that 15 privately owned affordable units are lost for every single new affordable unit that gets built, “the time for co-ownership is now,” Bell says.
According to Chapple and Al-musa, dividing single dwellings into two coowned units has the potential to create an additional 56,023 homes in Toronto, while three-way ownership sees that number jump to 266,223 homes, a 23 per cent increase over existing housing stock. Co-ownership, they add, provides more affordable housing options, potentially reducing the financial strain on average-income earners, and “promotes a sense of community and can lead to more diverse, resilient and inclusive neighbourhoods as people from various socio-economic backgrounds find affordable housing options.” Environmentally, “multiplex units are often more resource-efficient than larger developments, leading to a reduced carbon footprint and less urban sprawl.”
While co-ownership is a useful “workaround” for increasing affordable housing stock across the GTA, it is far from a solution to the current shortage, Re/max’s Alexander says. “Like modern, innovative homebuyers, our governments must be more strategic and visionary in how we can use existing lands and real estate to drive our housing supply to allow for a greater diversity of housing.”