Last year Jaco Joubert set out to estimate the number of condos in Toronto that are potentially sitting vacant. It was a response to the ongoing speculation that too many investor-owned condos are sitting empty across the city and thereby limiting the supply of housing.

To accomplish this, he photographed 15 different buildings at night (and at different times of the year) and monitored who had their lights on. He then turned these photographs into heat maps and compared the lighting pattern to the floor plans of each building in order to determine the unit demising.

This month Jaco published his findings. All in all, he estimates that he surveyed some 1,362 units. And of these units, 76 are believed to be vacant (when in doubt he erred on the side of occupied). So a vacancy of 5.6%. Is that more or less than what you were expecting?

Now, the buildings he "surveyed" are all located downtown and they are all roughly the same vintage. So you could easily argue that these aren't necessarily representative of the city's broader condo stock, assuming that's where you want to take this. Still, an interesting study.

BNN Bloomberg just published this article on the Toronto condo market. It is based on a roundtable discussion that was held at their Toronto office last week with Jim Ritchie of Tridel, Jared Menkes of Menkes Developments, Shamez Virani of CentreCourt, and Jane Renwick of Diamond Kilmer Developments.

The overarching theme is that, after a couple of frenetic record setting years, the market should settle down in 2019, which is likely a good thing. Hopefully that will also temper construction cost inflation. We have been seeing double digit increases over the last few years (hence some of the cancelled projects).

But as Jared points out, the fundamentals here are still strong and there are a number of supply constraints creating upward pressure on pricing:

Jared Menkes, executive vice president of high-rise residential at Menkes Developments was unwavering for the future. “There’s a lot of red tape that’s slowing down bringing more product to market,” Menkes said. “I promise you, pricing is going up.”

For the rest of the article, click here.

Urbanation released its Q3-2018 condo market results for the Greater Toronto Area earlier this month. 

Here are a few highlights:

- The unsold inventory of new condos in development is currently 33% below the 10-year average of 14,806 units.

- Year-to-date sales of new condominiums decreased to 14,055 units from 25,839 units (same period last year). 2017 was a record year.

- The average price per square foot for new project launches in Q3-2018 was $1,044 psf. This is the first time the average has broken the $1,000 psf mark. 

- This is a significant price increase from last year and it is being driven by low supply, stable demand, and rising development/construction costs (my opinion).

- The average unit size for project launches in Q3-2018 was 714 sf.

- The average opening quarter absorption rate remains above 55%. It has been this way since Q1-2016.

For the full press release, click here.