New home, condo sales rebound from 2013 slump, but report warns Canada’s boom times are ending,

Gap between cost of highrise and lowrise homes grows by 7% to record $221,063

New home and highrise condo sales have rebounded from last year’s dramatic slump and exceeded 10-year averages for sales in the first quarter of the year, says research firm RealNet Canada.

Lowrise home sales — which have hit record lows over the last two or three years — were up 51 per cent in the first three months of 2014 over the same period last year.

Highrise condo sales saw an even bigger uptick, coming in 68 per cent above the same quarter of 2013 when the industry was in a significant downturn.

The sale of 4,962 condos in the first three months of 2014 far exceeded the 10-year average for the quarter of 3,675. In fact, it wasn’t far behind the record 5,372 condos sold in Q1 of 2011, which would go on to become the peak year for condo sales across the GTA.

Last month was the best March ever for highrise condo sales, with transactions up 105 per cent (to a total of 2,496 units) over the same month last year, and up 42 per cent over the 10-year average, said RealNet president George Carras in releasing the statistics Wednesday.

The index price of a highrise condo was up one per cent in the first quarter, to $436,989, said RealNet. The index price of a new lowrise home in the GTA was up three per cent in the quarter, to $657,961.

That means the gap between the index price of a condo and a house has now grown by another seven per cent, to $221,063.

The inventory of unsold units continues to grow — it’s now at 30,898, more than 22,000 of those highrise condos versus lowrise homes, said RealNet. And most of those unsold condo suites have yet to even be built.

New unit sizes continue to shrink — they now average less than 800 square feet across the GTA — as developers try to keep costs down in the face of higher development fees and other costs.