Last year was a slow one for Toronto real estate, with residential sales numbers slumping to jarring lows during some months, led largely by a flailing condo market.
The number of condo units switching hands dropped to the worst level in some 27 years over the summer, resulting in an abundance of inventory that afforded buyers a bit more bargaining power. For new builds of all types, the landscape was especially bad, pushing some developments onto the backburner or even into receivership.
Still, the latest retrospective from the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB) shows that even amid little activity and a subsequent — and substantial — uptick in available properties that ended up sitting on the market for longer than historically, the average price for a home in the GTA only declined by less than one per cent between 2023 and 2024.
This was in part thanks to lower interest rates, which helped ease costs despite stubborn prices, inspiring more people to dive into home ownership.
And, even though year-over-year sales were down quite drastically for some housing types during some months, looking at all sales over the course of the whole year, 2.6 per cent more homes changed hands in 2024 than the year prior.
Still, this figure paled in comparison to the number of listings that came onto the market — 166,121, which was 16.4 per cent more than the number of new listings in 2023, and far more than the 67,610 annual sales.
As TRREB wrote on Tuesday, “the average selling price for all home types combined was $1,117,600 in 2024, representing a decline of less than one per cent compared to the 2023 average of $1,126,263. Market conditions were tighter for ground-oriented housing and selling prices held up better in these segments as a result. Price declines were more notable for condo apartments.”
“Many would-be first-time buyers remained on the sidelines, anticipating more interest rate relief in 2025. The lack of first-time buyers impacted the less-expensive condo segment more so than the single-family segments… Consumer sentiment, monetary policy, development policy and issues such as congestion continued to impact the resale, new and rental housing markets,” it continued.
Unfortunately for buyers, while the board used these figures to highlight the year’s increased affordability and technically lower home prices, it does lead one to wonder what, if anything, could drive prices down any noticeable amount.
Even for new condos, for which sales fell an incredible 81 per cent year-over-year and 87 per cent below the 10-year average in the third quarter of the year, average prices softened by only 2.4 per cent per square foot over the same time period.
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