When the Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB) released its April 2017 statistics, a lot of media keyed in on the year-over-year (YoY) increase in new listings and how they "soared" or "jumped": Indeed the overall numbers were up. Some commentators were saying that this was indicating a "flood" of listings as people were rushing to sell their homes and cash out of the market before the bubble burst. I have 3 problems with this, which I'll get to below.... [read more]

The MLS Home Price Index (HPI) is supposed to act like the more familiar Consumer Price Index (CPI). While the CPI tracks the price of a basket of goods, the HPI tracks the price of a basket of house attributes. For a more detailed look into how the HPI works, check out this blog post. Similar to the monthly Toronto real estate market charts, the full set of HPI charts (with the charts much larger and more legible) are available as a SlideShare report The HPI isn't... [read more]

First of all it's important to know what goes into the price of a home. You may be familiar with MPAC (Municipal Property Assessment Corporation). They're the ones that do your property assessments every four years upon which your municipal property taxes are based. They're responsible for assessing and classifying more than 5 million properties so they know a little about home values. According to MPAC, the following 5 factors account for 85% of the value of a house: Show me... [read more]

Are you curious how your house or condo has appreciated over time compared to the average in the city? Or how those average price increases look versus the stock market? Well then you came to the right place. This is the third time I've compiled these numbers (following Q4 2016 and Q2 2016). I will excerpt some charts in this blog post, but the full report is available here on this website, or as a SlideShare presentation. Please note... [read more]

This is the third part in a three part series, mapping out information and statistics on all 144 Toronto neighbourhoods.  Part 1 talked about price increases, while Part 2 looked at the most and least expensive neighbourhoods. Part 3 will now discuss the what neighbourhoods are the quickest and slowest to sell. East is the Least For context, the average detached house in Toronto sold in 13.7 days in 2016. The median neighbourhood average... [read more]