Riz Dhanji, who is the founder and president of RAD Marketing, is a long-time partner of ours. We are working together on One Delisle and on our waterfront project in the Niagara Benchlands. Riz has worked on some of Canada's most high-profile development projects, has been through past cycles, and has even sold real estate to Elton John. That's something.

So today, I'm happy to share this recent Livabl podcast that he appeared on with host Matthew Slutsky.

One theme that you'll notice in the episode is the focus on end-user buyers. Talk to anyone in the condominium business and they'll tell you that these are the few active buyers today. Investors are largely sitting on the sidelines. On the surface, this should be a healthy reset for the market — a refocusing on the actual customer. It’s also, in my opinion, a generational opportunity for buyers.

But what I continue to find ironic is the number of end-users who also remain sidelined. For years, pundits loved to criticize Toronto's new home market for being too geared toward investors. The argument was that it was a market based on speculation and that investors were crowding out real people from fulfilling their basic shelter needs. Developers were creating financial assets, not homes.

Now the pundits have gotten exactly what they wanted: less speculation, less competition, and lower prices. So where, then, are all the end-users? Why are they not banging down the doors of sales galleries and saying, "Thank goodness — we're no longer being crowded out?"

Instead, what has happened is that the market has stalled out and new housing supply has largely shut off (the effects of which won’t be felt for a few more years).

The question now is what will it look like once it returns. Who will be the buyers? Like every market, most people prefer to buy when everyone else is buying the same thing. So I suspect many end-users are waiting until there's more activity (i.e. competition). But when that time comes, they won't be the only buyers in the market.