Many could be renters for life

That’s helped fuel the unprecedented condo boom in the GTA, especially in the downtown core where, despite thousands of new suites, the rental vacancy rate remains below 2 per cent.

With the average resale price of even a Toronto condo now inching toward the $500,000 mark, developers are starting to shift their sights to building rental units, anticipating that many millennials will be renters for life.

“Millennials have much less of an attraction to owning a single-family home and a car. They’ve got much more of an attraction to a lifestyle and a job,” said James McKellar, director of the real estate and infrastructure program at York University’s Schulich School of Business.

“And many of them, especially in the United States, have become skeptical of this notion of a house as an investment.”

But with 1.5 million millennials in the GTA region alone, they’re likely to keep sending shock waves through the housing market, just as their parents did before them.

“There’s a shifting sensibility around how we define home,” said Toronto developer Mazyar Mortazavi, whose company, Tas Design-Build, is now focusing on midrise condo projects in neighbourhoods just outside the core.

“Millennials and the subset before them, the late 30-somethings, are probably the first generation of people who are living their early adult life in urban centres. For them, home has more to do with being part of a complete community than it did in their parents’ generation, when it was about having a backyard, a picket fence and a two-car garage.”