A lack of homes for sale ought to be able to drive Toronto’s sizzling housing market to another year of double-digit price increases, the city’s real estate board told Tuesday.
The Toronto Real Estate Board said the average price for all types of housing is forecast to rise to about $825,000 — up from $730,472 in December and $729,922 for the 2016 calendar year.
The largest year-over-year price increases will be for low-rise types of housing such as detached and semi-detached the house and townhouses, said the board, which represents about 46,000 real estate brokers and salespersons.
“While a modification to federal mortgage lending guiding principles and higher borrowing expenditures may impact some would-be homebuyers, the big-hearted deterrent will be the lack of inventory,” Jason Mercer, the board’s administrator of market analysis, said in a statement.
The number of listings at the end of December, 2016 were at their lowest since before 2000, Mercer said.
“It is unlikely that the shortage of listings will improve to any great degree over the course of the next year in 2017,” he told.” This will set a ceiling on sales growth.”
The board appraisals are there will be between 104,500 and 115,500 residence sales in 2017 through its MLS system — more or less similar to the 113,133 recorded in 2016.
TREB is recurring its call for the private, public and not-for-profit sectors to search solutions to increase the supplying of properties for sale in the Toronto region rather than attempt to reduce demand from would-be buyers.
It told a foreign buyer’s tax, which some called for to rein in Toronto house rates (The Ontario Government has installed special 15% Foreign Buyer’s Tax in Greater Toronto areas) after such a tax was implemented in Vancouver, would be misguided. It pointed to a survey it conducted among our own TREB members in late 2016 that concluded 4.9 per cent of the members of transactions in the Greater Toronto Area involved foreigners.
After a tax on foreign nationals buying property in Vancouver was introduced in August, 2016, the city considered a whopping drop in the number of homes sold — in a number of cases, monthly sales fell between 30 to nearly 40 per cent of the members on a year-over-year basis.
