There has been a lot of media misdirections with eyeball grabbing headlines of late.
“Praying for a Real Estate Crash” – Macleans
“Toronto Housing Prices Have Already Fallen 12% from their Peak” – Huffington
“Home Prices Could Fall Up to 40 Per Cent” – CTV
Alternatively, there are also media outlines printing headlines that look like this.
“5 Reasons Why the Toronto Housing Market Won’t Crash” – Huffington
“Waiting For a Canadian Housing Crash? Warren Buffet Bets Against It” – T. Sun
“Why Canada’s Housing ‘Bubbles’ Aren’t Headed for Catastrophe” – Yahoo
The best is when the same media outline prints conflicting headlines….Huffington, I’m looking at you lol.
And my favourite is….”Real Estate: Three experts, one night, zero agreement”. That is the best. It basically sums up nicely in one sentence the thoughts on the Toronto real estate market, Scattered!
I’m writing this to not personally tell you what I think is going to happen but to lay some observations I’ve had of late for you.
1) There has been an increasing number of listing withdrawals. This, in short, is basically Sellers putting their property on the market and testing if they can get “that” price that will make them sell. If not they take it off the market and keep it. This has been a common reoccurrence I’ve been hearing from other realtors. This means our surplus of supply could be dwindling soon.
2) Despite the headlines, there are certain nodes in Toronto that are increasing in prices still. The downtown area, C01 and C08, or South of Bloor between Dufferin and Jarvis are doing well. Sales are happening there and condos are still selling at $1000 PSF. Although there are no crazy offers and offer dates, multiple offers on resale still exist.
3) The availability of new build Condos, Pre-construction, is at an all time low. There are about 600 total units available all over the GTA. Which is absurdly low FYI. Some people have been saying Toronto is over the building but we may not be building enough.
4) Lack of supply in the rental market despite rents still going up ~10% per annum is making Toronto less and less affordable.
So something tells me this “lull” from the government changes, 15% foreign buyer tax and rent control, could be the calm before the storm.
Until next time, Happy Real Estate-ing!
Zhen
