More than a thousand brokers and agents sipped wine and nibbled ahi tuna hors d’oeuvres at the black-tie sales launch of a luxury condominium in downtown Toronto last month.
A spokeswoman for RioCan REIT, which is developing the building with Metropia and Capital Developments, said more than 70 per cent of the units have been sold since the mid-September launch. “I worked 90 hours in one week,” said Simeon Papailias, co-founder of the Real Estate Center, a real-estate management company. He sold 30 condos in one weekend. “The pre-sale market is on fire again but resale has picked up too: We’re having the best back-to-back month since 2017.”
“The demand side of the equation is incredibly strong and the supply side is a puzzle that has not been figured out by anybody,” said Sasha Cucuz, a partner at Greybrook Capital, a private-equity firm with a North American real estate portfolio valued at more than $15 billion, including projects underway. “When you couple those together, that’s an indisputable upward pressure on pricing, flat out, whether it’s rental or housing.
Prices in Calgary and Vancouver are still below recent records, down 5.9 per cent and 7 per cent respectively, according to Teranet-National Bank Home Price Indexes.