There have been a lot of articles in the news lately about blind bidding wars and bidding wars in general. Heck, the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board even felt obliged to issue a statement to its members about it: It's topical because through the first 4 months of this year, 69% of freehold (lowrise houses) sales were "sold over asking." So bidding wars are the standard this year (and these rates are even higher in the 905 currently). One of the things that these... [read more]

Consumers are now armed with more data than ever on housing. TRREB makes all of its monthly statistics available to the public via its website (and has for a long time). You've got several websites to choose from that give you sold data. And you've got a handful that use some kind of algorithms (I'm assuming) to give you price estimates for homes that are currently on the market - which is important these days since 65% of freeholds (detached, semi-detached, and rowhouses) this year... [read more]

Back in March I wrote a blog post looking at the price gap between detached houses and condo apartments in the 416, noting it had come well off of the spring 2017 highs and was back to 2015 levels (on an absolute dollars basis) or 2013 levels (on a ratio basis). At that time I wrote: It may be a good time for move-up buyer to swing from a condo to a house as the price gap is back to 2015 levels. Then again, there may be more gap shrinking to come. I don't have a crystal ball,... [read more]

Every month recently has been a lot different than the prior. In February things were hot. March was a tale of two halves, with the first half continuing hot, and then the brakes coming on in the second half after all three levels of government started implementing COVID-19 measures. Then April was one long month of riding the brakes, with 2,975 GTA sales representing the lowest April in the last 25 years (as far back as TRREB supplies monthly numbers for). May was a bit of bounceback... [read more]

I used to have a searchable archive of all blog posts from 2016 to 2018 on my Century 21 website. However Century 21 changed over their websites to a new provider and now those links are gone. Thanks for that totally smooth changeover! I have now painstakingly migrated over all of my pre-2019 entries onto the website you're on now. That is, all of them except the monthly reports; I figured people probably wouldn't care too much now about how the Toronto real estate... [read more]