Urbanation just released its Q1-2025 condominium market survey results for the Greater Toronto & Hamilton Area (GTHA). Here's how things are looking:

The entire GTHA recorded 533 new condominium sales and the City of Toronto recorded 215 new condominium sales in the quarter. Once again, and as you can see above, this is the lowest level since the early 90s.

For all intents and purposes, I think you can look at these sales figures as mostly representing a zero. The numbers are relatively small and a sale doesn't necessarily equate 1:1 to an eventual new home. The sale needs to be within a project that achieves its requisite pre-sales for construction financing.

Urban sprawl is how much of the US provides new housing. And here's Conor Dougherty in the New York Times arguing that America needs more of it to fix its housing shortage:

Even if all the regulatory restraints were removed tomorrow, developers couldn’t find enough land to satisfy America’s housing needs inside established areas. Consequently, much of the nation’s housing growth has moved to states in the South and Southwest, where a surplus of open land and willingness to sprawl has turned the Sun Belt into a kind of national sponge that sops up housing demand from higher-cost cities. The largest metro areas there have about 20 percent of the nation’s population, but over the past five years they have built 42 percent of the nation’s new single-family homes, according to a recent report by Cullum Clark, an economist at the George W. Bush Institute, a research center in Dallas.

The obvious benefit is that the resulting housing tends to be cheap. The above article is filled with examples of people buying large homes for a few hundred thousand dollars in newly formed communities across Texas. And if you live in a high-cost city, the social algorithms have almost certainly found you at some point with a shockingly cheap house in one of these places. But, Dougherty also admits that sometimes this may be the only redeeming quality:

Escobar told me he moved to Princeton because he could find a big house there for less than $300,000, but now the city is home, and he didn’t like where it was headed. Over the next four years, he said, his goal is to redevelop the downtown, try to attract offices where locals can work and build out a park system that voters recently funded with a bond measure. “You ask anybody what they love about Princeton, and it’s simply just the affordability,” Escobar told me. “We need to be more than that.”

According to the article, this isn't necessarily a problem, because it's just how cities are built in this day and age. What you do is start with low-cost housing in fringe locations. You grow as quickly as possible until traffic becomes "godawful" and vital infrastructure can't keep up. Then you implement moratoriums on new housing, and start working on other uses like, you know, employment. Eventually, after all this chaos is complete, you end up with something that possibly resembles a real city.

Urbanation just released its Q1-2025 condominium market survey results for the Greater Toronto & Hamilton Area (GTHA). Here's how things are looking:

The entire GTHA recorded 533 new condominium sales and the City of Toronto recorded 215 new condominium sales in the quarter. Once again, and as you can see above, this is the lowest level since the early 90s.

For all intents and purposes, I think you can look at these sales figures as mostly representing a zero. The numbers are relatively small and a sale doesn't necessarily equate 1:1 to an eventual new home. The sale needs to be within a project that achieves its requisite pre-sales for construction financing.

Urban sprawl is how much of the US provides new housing. And here's Conor Dougherty in the New York Times arguing that America needs more of it to fix its housing shortage:

Even if all the regulatory restraints were removed tomorrow, developers couldn’t find enough land to satisfy America’s housing needs inside established areas. Consequently, much of the nation’s housing growth has moved to states in the South and Southwest, where a surplus of open land and willingness to sprawl has turned the Sun Belt into a kind of national sponge that sops up housing demand from higher-cost cities. The largest metro areas there have about 20 percent of the nation’s population, but over the past five years they have built 42 percent of the nation’s new single-family homes, according to a recent report by Cullum Clark, an economist at the George W. Bush Institute, a research center in Dallas.

The obvious benefit is that the resulting housing tends to be cheap. The above article is filled with examples of people buying large homes for a few hundred thousand dollars in newly formed communities across Texas. And if you live in a high-cost city, the social algorithms have almost certainly found you at some point with a shockingly cheap house in one of these places. But, Dougherty also admits that sometimes this may be the only redeeming quality:

Escobar told me he moved to Princeton because he could find a big house there for less than $300,000, but now the city is home, and he didn’t like where it was headed. Over the next four years, he said, his goal is to redevelop the downtown, try to attract offices where locals can work and build out a park system that voters recently funded with a bond measure. “You ask anybody what they love about Princeton, and it’s simply just the affordability,” Escobar told me. “We need to be more than that.”

According to the article, this isn't necessarily a problem, because it's just how cities are built in this day and age. What you do is start with low-cost housing in fringe locations. You grow as quickly as possible until traffic becomes "godawful" and vital infrastructure can't keep up. Then you implement moratoriums on new housing, and start working on other uses like, you know, employment. Eventually, after all this chaos is complete, you end up with something that possibly resembles a real city.