APARTMENT SALES ENLARGEMENT

Mondo condo sales for 2011
Lisa Van De Ven,
National Post, Sept. 10, 2011

If you ask Ben Myers, 25,000 is the magic number. There may still be a few months left of 2011, but Mr. Myers, executive vicepresident and editor at real estate research firm Urbanation, already has his forecast for the year. He expects there will be 25,000 new condominium sales by the end of 2011. If he's right, it'll be a new record, surpassing 2007's previous record of about 22,500 new condo sales.

"We're certainly on pace to have the most condominium sales in any one year in 2011," Mr. Myers says. And with the Toronto new-condo market coming off a busier-than-normal summer and a record-setting second quarter, he's not surprised.

Urbanation recently released its second-quarter results. From April to June, Mr. Myers says, 9,455 new condo units were sold in the Toronto CMA. That's a record in itself; the previous best quarter was 2007's second quarter, when 6,997 units were sold. That wasn't the only Q2 number to be beat, though. The quarter also set records for the number of active projects, the number of active units, the number of new condominium launches and the number of projects and units under construction.

"There was a huge number of new projects coming on line," Mr. Myers says. "And surprisingly, even with all of this extra supply, they had the highest absorption rate ever of new product. Even in the face of all this additional supply, they sold better than any other new release that we had in a quarter."

But Mr. Myers is quick to dispel any talk that the Toronto market might be in the middle of a real estate bubble. Prices, he says, have remained "pretty consistent" over the past five years, with 7% to 9% increases in the new condo market from year to year.

"A bubble is characterized by rapid increases in prices, and we haven't seen that," he says. "That's the type of thing you obviously saw in the United States and you even saw in Calgary a few years ago, where you saw 20% and 25% increases year over year, and in our market in the '80s where we saw prices double in three years."

Developers, he says, have been doing their homework and "setting fairly moderate pricing." They're also, it seems, paying less attention to the sales seasons of the past. Whereas spring and fall are still the prime selling times, more developers decided to release their projects in the summer this year. Since the market is being driven by investors more than ever, Mr. Myers says, there was less need to wait out the summer season, when end users are typically on holiday and less focused on condo buying.

According to the Building Industry and Land Development Association (BILD, using data provided by RealNet Canada), 1,490 new condo units were sold throughout the Greater Toronto Area in July, up almost 20% from last year. "Forget the old conventions of a spring and fall market," says Stephen Dupuis, BILD's president and CEO. "The market's that much bigger now - it's active all the time."

Photo By: GalleryLoftsCA