Toronto & GTA Real Estate Statistics for January, 2016

Toronto, February 4, 2016 - Whoa! Where went January? Here we are already past “Gopher Day"… 6 weeks ago we were doing “last minute shopping”. [Well…some of us were…]. Scary.

Chart - Toronto & GTA Home Sales & Average Price by Major Home Type 2016-01 But!... The residential real estate market chugged on with 4,672 homes sold in Toronto and the GTA in January 2016 - an 8.2% rise year-over-year.

“It is clear that the handoff from 2015 to 2016 was a strong one. This is not surprising given that recent polling conducted for TREB by Ipsos suggested 12% of GTA households were seriously considering the purchase of a home in 2016….”, Toronto Real Estate Board President Mark McLean said in the report released yesterday.

This market is obviously driven to a large degree by the combination of historically low interest rates and very tight inventory - particularly in the Detached and other “low-rise“ home styles.

Despite that tight inventory, however, sales of Detached homes in “The 416” jumped 11.2% compared to January 2015 with 496 units trading this January. In “The 905”, there were 1,613 Detached homes sold in January, a 5.4% rise. Average prices for those Detached sales were $1,061,789 in Metropolitan Toronto, an 11.6% rise, and $783,565 in the balance of the GTA: That’s a 20.9% rise year-over-year for the Detached group in the regions surrounding the City of Toronto. [See the last paragraph re: sales of higher-end homes]. Chart - Toronto & GTA Home Sales Year-Over-Year Summary @ 2016-01.png

Overall then, for the entire area, Detached home sales rose 6.7% to 2,109, and jumped 18.5% in average price to $848,999.

Sales of Semi-Detached homes in Metro Toronto actually fell 3.2% to 122 units, but that's more likely an issue of inventory than demand: prices for those units rose 7.3% year-over-year to $713,972. [In the balance of the GTA, sales of Semis rose 14.6% to 330 units at an average price of $515,024, up 12.8%].

Sales of Condo Apartments were strong in Metro Toronto, up 11.6% to 897 units at an average price of $416,104 - an 8.6% gain. In the rest of the GTA, Condo Apartment sales rose 3.6% to 405 units at an average price of $319,855, up 3.1%. Chart - Toronto & GTA Home Sales Historic Annual Stats to 2016-01.png

As noted above, inventory remains very tight. The number of Total Active Listings at the end of January was 9,966, off 14.1% from 11,600 at the same time last year. Dividing that figure by the total sales for the month [4,672] we get an “indicated forward inventory” of 2.13 months. Two years ago [January, 2014], that forward inventory figure was 2.88 months [11,903 active listings versus 4135 sales]. Last January it was at 2.66 months [11,600 active listings / 4355 sales].

Not surprisingly, homes sold "6.5% faster" this January compared to last: 29 days on the market this year versus 31 last year.

We don’t pay a lot of attention to the “HPI”, but the report did note that higher end homes in “The 905” significantly weighted the average price figure in January: “The MLS® Home Price Index Composite Benchmark Price for January 2015 was up by 11.2 per cent on a year-over-year basis. The average selling price over the same period was up by 14.1 per cent. The difference in the annual growth rates for the MLS® HPI and average price was largely due to a greater share of high-end detached homes sold in the regions surrounding the City of Toronto [emphasis added] this year compared to last. The MLS® HPI removes the impact of shifts in the share of different property types sold from one year to the next.”

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