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December 22, 2016

Worst new housing supply drought in Toronto in 16 years drives prices to fresh records

Supply of new low-rise homes in the city have declined so dramatically in the past decade that some projects are selling out just hours after launching, builders say.

There hasn’t been this little housing available in November in the Greater Toronto Area in almost 16 years.

The Building and Land Development Association said Thursday that a critical shortage of supply is driving prices to record levels in the detached home category, but also in high-rise condominiums.

“The low inventory story is not only about low-rise – high-rise inventories have been on a downward path over the past three years,” said Patricia Arsenault, executive vice-president of research consulting services at Altus Data Solutions. “Total available inventory in November was the lowest November level we have seen since we first started to track this data in 2000.”

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BILD said at the end of November, there were 15,184 new homes in builders’ inventories, only 84 more than in August, the lowest level on record.

By comparison, in November 2006 there were 31,150 new homes available for sale, according to Altus Group, BILD’s official data source.

Low-rise supply made up only 13 per cent of the available inventory at the end of November. There were just 2,036 low-rise units across the GTA, 789 of which were detached single-family houses. Available high-rise supply was also down in November, falling to 13,148 units.

The impact of low inventory resulted in record-setting prices for detached homes and high-rise condominiums in November. The average price of a new condo in the GTA in November was $493,137, a 10 per cent increase from a year ago.

The average price of new detached home in the GTA hit $1,230,961 in November, up 27 per cent from a year ago. Since the beginning of the year, prices for new detached single-family homes in the GTA have risen about $258,000.

Overall, the average price for a new low-rise home, which includes detached, semi-detached houses and townhomes, was up 20 per cent over the last year to $977,890.

“The industry is building to government policy and building far fewer low-rise homes, especially detached single-family homes, but demand has not dropped with the supply so prices continue to increase,” said Michelle Noble, vice president of communications and marketing for BILD.

To date, there were 8,843 detached homes sold in the GTA, a 16 per cent decline from the first 11 months of 2015. A decade ago there were, 12,273 detached homes sold across the region during the same period of time.

Overall there have been 43,651 new homes sold in 2016 over the first 11 months of the year with high-rise accounting for 60 per cent or 26,299 of the number.

gmarr@nationalpost.com
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