If you've always longed to buy a new home that nobody has ever lived in, Toronto might not be the best place to put down roots at the moment — not even in from way up in the sky, where your roots literally have no land beneath them to grow.
Building a brand new house has never exactly been cheap, especially not in the exorbitantly overpriced City of Toronto, but prefabricated condos have traditionally been a reasonably affordable alternative for young buyers entering the market.
Such is no longer typically the case, according to the GTA's Building Industry and Land Development Association (BILD), which on Tuesday released its new home sale and price figures from July of 2021.
BILD, which represents more than 1,300 land development and home building companies in the Greater Toronto Area, reports that new home prices "reached record highs" last month amid falling inventory levels.
For newly-built single-family homes in particular, the benchmark price (defined by realtors as the price of a typical home in an area) reached an average of $1,517,841 — a flabbergasting hike of 28.4 per cent over the same time last year.
This category includes not only detached homes, but linked and semi-detached houses and townhouses.
New condominium apartments, meanwhile, posted a benchmark price of $1,091,648 in July, according to BILD, representing an increase of 9.8 per cent since July of 2020.
Remaining inventory, which includes units in preconstruction projects, in projects currently under construction, and in completed buildings, dropped on a month-over-month basis, leaving some 9,483 condo units available and just 1,598 houses across the entire region.
This (and the whole exploding price thing) may in part explain why overall sales fell last month — new single-family home sales were down 14 percent from the 10-year average and new condo sales fell 11 per cent, according to the home market intelligence specialists at Altus Group, which provides data to BILD.
"Low inventory levels for both condominium apartments and single-family homes are a persistent problem in the GTA that exerts upward pressure on prices," said BILD President and CEO Dave Wilkes when releasing the July figures this morning.
"We are encouraged to see that the issues of housing supply and affordability are prominent in the lead-up to the federal election — as they must be in elections at every level if we are to build the housing people in our region need, at prices they can afford. What we need is an alignment of federal, provincial and municipal housing policy on market-rate housing."
