Moving out to move up: Heading to the suburbs
Carolyn Hyde and Chris Ritchie were tired of paying rent on a basement apartment in Toronto, but knew that their strict spending limit — $400,000 tops — would make it a tough challenge to buy a house in the GTA, given that the average resale price stood at $632,685 in November.
The couple, both 29, didn’t take long to realize their best option was in Durham, the region many believe remains the most undervalued area of the GTA. Communities like Ajax, Oshawa, Pickering, Whitby and Brooklin have become magnets for millennials, especially as GO Transit frequency has improved and the eastern extension of Highway 407 nears completion.
The numbers tell the story: The average price of a resale home in the GTA — condos and single-family homes combined — was $654,221 in November, according to the Toronto Real Estate Board. In booming York Region, where price appreciation has even outpaced the sought-after City of Toronto, the average resale home price was $807,167 in November. In Durham, it was $455,603. Even new-home prices are dramatically different in Durham: an average of $546,334, compared to $811,110 for the GTA, according to market research firm RealNet Canada Inc.
“We talked for a little bit about staying in Toronto,” says Hyde, who works at Centennial College’s Scar- borough campus. “We looked online and went to open houses, but we pretty much decided immediately that we’d focus on Durham.
“Originally, we though we would just go to Pickering — that was our border. We never thought we’d go as far as Whitby, but we just liked its neighbourhood feel.”
But even that far out of the city, buying a simple row house wasn’t a cakewalk. They lost out on two bidding wars: In one case, they were bidding against just one other couple. In the second case, there were 11 bidders for same row house.
In the end, they resorted to a bully bid — a bid $5,000 over asking price, and before the deadline for offers — and snagged a 1,400-square-foot, three-bedroom townhouse near Taunton Rd. and Anderson St. for $380,000.
"What we liked is that the area has all the amenities of the city in a suburban neighbourhood,” says Hyde, who moved into the house with Ritchie, a teacher in Markham, last summer.