The average home price in the Greater Toronto Area hit a new high in June according to a report released by the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB) Monday.
The average home price across the GTA was $930,869, surpassing the peak recorded in April 2017 – a time when prices in the GTA were seeing huge year-over-year gains. Similarly, the median price of a home in the GTA reached a new record of $795,000, which was $10,000 larger than the previous high recorded in March 2017.
Toronto Average Home Price
In the City of Toronto, the average home price passed the $1m mark for the first time ever. At $1,022,138, the average price was 11.7% higher than at the same time last year. It also means that the top four months for average pries all occurred this year.
It should be noted that the type of homes being sold may be influencing the rise in average home prices. 51.1% of homes sold were detached homes – the most expensive segment of the market- and this marked the first time since May 2016 that detached homes have accounted for more than half of all sales. At the same time, condo apartments accounted for just 20.6% of sales, the smallest share of the market for that segment since May 2014. In the first month of 2020, detached homes and condo apartments accounted for 45.3% and 29.1% of sales respectively, and this change on the distribution of sales will have had a notable impact on the average price.
The benchmark price of a home ($863,700) wasn’t quite as high as the numbers recorded in March, April and May but it was close to record levels and, with the figure being based on closing transactions, can be expected to set a new record in the coming months.
Huge Increase in Sales
In total, there were 8,701 sales recorded across the GTA in June, which is almost double the number recorded in the previous month (4,606) and the most sales in a single month since June 2019. It is a sign that buyer demand is returning to pre-pandemic levels although there hasn’t been a full recovery and the total was still 1,029 short of the 10-year average for the month of June.
After several months of sellers holding off listing their properties, active listings were unsurprisingly down when compared to the previous year. There was a 28.8% year-over-year decrease, although this compares well to the much larger decreases recorded in the previous two months. However, there were signs that sellers might be returning to the market as the 16,153 new listings in June marked a 2.1% increase year-over-year. That total was actually the highest number of new listings recorded since October 2019.
Overall, it looks like the market is really starting to heat up and is approaching the kind of activity that we witnessed at the start of 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic enforced a temporary halt to a lot of real estate activity.
