As we know — because here’s the data — this is the current state of affairs:
The GTA condo market is in a state of economic lockdown. The math doesn’t make economic sense from both the demand side (investors) and the supply side (developers), leaving the market at a standstill.
The above excerpt is from a recent CIBC Capital Markets article by Benjamin Tal (CIBC) and Shawn Hildebrant (Urbanation). And what it ultimately means is that the supply of new condominiums in the GTA is falling and will continue to fall for the foreseeable future. Below are two charts, from the same article, that show that.
Because of this, I actually think that, if you need or want a place to live, right now is a near ideal time to buy a condominium, especially if it’s from developer inventory (in an already completed project) or it’s a resale. Of course, most people won’t want to do this because they’d rather buy when most other people in the market want to buy. This is how markets tend to go.
It has been a while since the GTA has gone through one of these real estate cycles, but it is typical: developers are prone to both over-building and under-building. It simply takes too long to build a building, and so it is natural for there to be moments when supply and demand don’t exactly line up.
Pre-selling condominiums is — in theory only — supposed to protect against too much overbuilding. But as we have spoken about many times before, it can be challenging for end users to buy a new home so far in advance. And so the new condominium market has come to rely on investors who want to buy early and then either sell later or rent later.
According to the above article (and MLS data), the share of newly completed condominiums used as rentals reached a peak of 34% in 2023. So a third of new condos. My gut tells me that the actual number is much higher. Many rentals never reach MLS. Overall, I think it’s very safe to assume that the majority of new condominiums are owned by investors.
But right now, fewer investors want to own condominiums, which is why the number of resale listings has spiked this year:
This is, again, why I think right now is an excellent time to buy a condo. You know, be greedy when others… Regardless, this inventory will need to get absorbed and that will ultimately happen. Some of it will go to end users and some of it will go to investors who can make sense of the rental math and/or want to take a long view on Toronto. But if more goes to the former, we will be losing a lot of new rental housing.
At the same time, while all of this is going on, construction starts are likely going to remain depressed (chart 3 above). It’s impossible to know how long this lasts, but at some point we will reach a moment in the cycle where we are under-building new housing. Maybe we’re already there. Development simply can’t turn on fast enough when demand spikes. There will almost always be a lag.
So, since the majority of new condominiums have been serving as new rental housing, there’s a strong case to be made that at some point we will run into a potentially severe shortage of rentals. Condo investors are sometimes vilified in the media, but we will soon find out what happens when you take a big chunk of them out of the housing market.
