TRREB’s April Real Estate Data.

While the prices year over year have dropped by 7.8%, they have been on a steady upward trajectory monthly this year. The new average sale price has reached $1,153,269 this year, which is a 4% increase since March 2023.

The same is happening in terms of the sales. There is a decline in the number of overall sales in the GTA of 5.2% since last April, but on a monthly basis, they jumped by 9%. The total amount of sales last month has reached 7,531.

As mentioned previously, the incentive to sell a home in these market conditions has been diminished, which was characterized by new listings dropping a whopping 38.3% year over year. The difference was over 7,000 listings since the previous year, but there was a tiny and perhaps insignificant increase of overall listings by 1.6%.

With that being said, the listings still take longer to sell and spend 71.4% longer on the market. While it would take about 10 days to sell a home last year, properties stayed on the market for 24 days on average last month. With the growing demand and shrinking supply of Toronto homes, this time is expected to shorten in the coming months.

Toronto homes are heading into the seller’s market

What is interesting is that despite the aggressive interest rate hikes of last year, the market never dipped into the buyer’s territory. Instead, it showed resilience, and the market hovered in the balanced zone for a good half of 2022. This year, however, we saw the return of the seller’s market, and it seems that it is only going deeper – the sales-to-new-listings ratio has surpassed 62% in March and jumped by a further 4% this April. For context, the further away from 60% SNLR, the deeper we are in the seller’s market.

Toronto condos and those in the GTA are expected to experience even more demand. Not only because they are the lowest hanging fruit in terms of affordability, but also because the rental market is scorching hot this year, with only a 1.7% vacancy rate at the moment. This means that out of all housing units, only about 1.7% are vacant at any given time. This is attractive to investors who know that it would be easy to rent out their properties. Another layer of demand for condos is expected from tenants who are currently paying historically high rental rates. As the difference between rental rates and monthly mortgage payments becomes less significant, more first-time homebuyers are expected to get back into the real estate market.

Another interesting trend that was observed this April is that there was a significant shift in demand from condos towards more expensive asset types – detached and semis. The sales jumped by 15% and 13% for each asset type month over month, respectively. Detached homes saw a bump in price of 5%, while semi-detached jumped by 4.4%. The highest price increase of 5.4% since March was for townhouses. Condos came in last with only a 2.9% increase in sales and a 1.8% increase in prices.