There’s the old adage that you get what you pay for. When it comes to a home it makes entire sense that you’ll need to pay much more for any home that’s much larger and provides you and your family with more square footage to live in. And of course a condominium is always going to make more sense financially if you’re a couple without kids and you’d prefer to be living in an urban area. That’s amplified a thousand times over in Canada considering how expensive housing is here if you do want to live within a reasonable distance of a major metro region.
So no one is going to be surprised to hear that there’s a BIG gap between median prices for condos and ones for detached homes. And for ones between condos and town homes too for that matter, especially if you’re choosing to live in the GTA or GVA. But what’s happening now is the gap between the two median prices is becoming downright enormous, and as you’d expect it’s decreasing the number of buyers legitimately qualified to buy homes and then transferring that pressure into the condo buyer pool.
Again, nothing about this is unnatural in the market, but the extent and speed with which it’s happening definitely does reflect on what’s a disturbing overall trend in Canada – housing affordability. There is no easy fix to it, but realtors who are struggling to find qualified homebuyers to work with can take advantage of our online real estate lead generation system here at Real Estate Leads to counter and significant downswing in their business resulting from any aberrational new market realities
We’re going to take the opportunity to discuss this widening chasm in home prices based on property type in Canada with this entry, so let’s get into it.
Ontario / B.C. Predominance
A recent study is indicating that house prices are more than double the cost of condominiums in 14 Canadian cities, the bulk of which are in Ontario and British Columbia. This data has been drawn from MLS benchmark prices as overseen by the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) and realtor associations in each local market based on the end of May this year. Property types are defining benchmark prices instead of square footage.
The takeaway from it is that it is an increasingly bleak picture for buyers looking to upsize from condos to houses. These individuals and couples are of course the exact people who realtors are frequently working with, ones who have already been first-time homebuyers and in many instances have now outgrown their condo because of a growing family or some other very legitimate reason.
Let’s start in Vancouver, where local governments are actively joining the Feds in facilitating the building of a little Jakarta on the West Coast of Canada. All in the name of ‘economy’. One has to wonder what’s the appeal in doing that, but locals at ground level are increasingly being priced out from even the most introductory of accommodations. In Vancouver, houses are now in the vicinity of $1.2 million more expensive than condos. On average this represents a whopping difference of about 153%, and even if you’re already a detached homeowner in Lotus land it should still leave you shocked and perhaps appalled too.
