Immer mehr Eigentumswohnungen in Toronto werden im Wert von 300.000 US-Dollar verkauft, da die Preise endlich (etwas) erschwinglicher werden

None of these images are condos though. Why write an article on Toronto condos and show detached and semi-detached houses?

I don’t think people who aren’t involved in the Toronto condo industry truly understand just how utterly fucked everything is. We all know it’s fucked, but however fucked you think it is, it’s worse.

If you bought a pre-con condo unit in Toronto around Covid times, you lost, plain and simple. If you bought it as a primary residence, you could have waited a few years, saved up more, and got something better than a shoebox. But at least you have property now, you might as well live in it.

Now if you bought it as rental property, lmao. Whatever rental income you can generate, *it will not even pay off the expenses*. Your mortgage is higher than you expected, and you can add property tax, condo fees, and closing costs to that side of the ledger. As for revenues? Rents are down, because demand was being falsely propped up by a clearly unsustainable immigration system. There is no world where $3000/mo for a 500sqft 1-bed condo made sense, except for the one that was falsely created by the geniuses in our governments.

So a lot of people are willing to take a loss just to get rid of an unsustainable asset. But who’s gonna buy it? Yes there are condo units in the $300k’s which is completely affordable for a middle-class buyer in Toronto, but those units are the 500 square foot shoeboxes. People don’t buy those to live in, they buy those to rent out, and I already addressed why that no longer makes financial sense. Most young Canadians are in no position to buy. In the GTA, it’s now the norm for someone in their 20s to live with their parents until they get married. Once you have two incomes, either it’s high enough to buy an actual livable townhouse (or detached if you’re richy-rich), or you’re permanent tenants. The „middle option“ of buying a shoebox condo to live in is appealing to no one. Hence the ludicrous drop in prices.

These condos are the worst possible form of housing you could imagine in a first world country. So now we’re sitting around, realizing that the housing supply shortage is even worse than we imagined. Not only did we not build enough, but what we did build was a really shitty product meant for a market that no longer exists. There are massive, well-established developers that are having to cancel major projects. Some of these guys will go under, we’re talking huge names here, not „mom-and-pop“ shacks but billion-dollar companies that employ thousands of people, keep the lights on for so many contractors, etc. If they go down, it will fuck up the economy even more than it already is.

That whole rant I spent the last 15 minutes typing up doesn’t even scratch the surface. Canada got housing so, *so* wrong, and nowhere is that more evident than in Toronto.