It has now been a month since the Ontario Government announced a State of Emergency in Ontario due to Covid-19. I have been posting regular updates on my Instagram but thought I would do a big longer form post here to give you an update on what has been happening in the Toronto Condo Market. For the purpose of this study I only looked at Toronto TREB Districts (sorry 905, you will have to do your own research).

Toronto Condos Average Price Since Covid-19 State of Emergency

Tracking Condo Average Prices in Toronto TREB Districts

As you can see clearly above, the average price of a condo in the city has dropped significantly but this doesn’t mean condos are selling for much less than a few months ago. What is really bringing the average price down is fewer sales over $1M, in fact, they are almost non-existent. The luxury market has come to a grind and very few condos are moving in this segment of the market. Not surprisingly there still is good demand at the entry level area of the market and condos under $700k are moving very well even with the state of emergency.

Toronto Condo Market Stats: DOM, Sales & New Listings

Sales, DOM (Days on Market) & New Listings in the Toronto Condo Market

The next thing I have been monitoring is the number of sales, the days on market of each condo sold (DOM) and new listings hitting the market. While sales have dropped dramatically, so have the number of new listings which should alleviate some pressure on the condos currently listed to not have to reduce their prices so quickly. The scariest part of this chart is the sales which have dropped extremely low and though April 12-18 hasn’t been a full week yet, most days are showing just single digit sales activity and there are only 10 pending sales (condos sold conditionally). This is quite concerning for the listings that are hitting the market this week. While DOM has remained relatively low it has started to creep up in the last few days which is something I will be keeping a close eye on.

Sales to New Listing Ratio for Toronto Condos

Sales to New Listing Ratio

I wanted to dig a little deeper so this week I started tracking the SNLR (Sales to New Listing Ratio). This shows what percentage of new listings are selling. As you can see this number is falling dramatically indicating that listing aren’t slowing down as fast as the number of condos selling. This was one of the more alarming stats and if we continue on this path we will start to see inventory build up VERY QUICKLY. The last few days only 15% of condos listed are selling which means the longer this continues the more inventory will build up.

Months of Inventory (MOI)

Because of concerns of inventory building up, the next stat I looked at was the current month’s of inventory (MOI). This number reflects how many month’s it would take to sell the current number of condos on the market if nothing new came to market and conditions did not improve on the sales side. There were 2052 condos on the market at the time of this study and in the last month there were 790 sales. Based on this there is 2.6 month’s of inventory which indicates a seller’s market (a balanced market is around 3-4 month’s of inventory). But I decided to take this one step further and assume that the last month was as bad as the previous 7 days and multiplied this by 4.5x (31.5 days). I also assumed that all 10 pending sales firmed up and all were from the last 7 days (likely some are a bit older as your typical status condition is 14 days). This worked out to an assumed 292.5 sales in the month if the other days were as bad as this last week. When I divided the current active listings by this number the month’s of inventory shot up to 7.02, very much a buyer’s market.

Before we jump to any conclusions with this data I don’t think we will stay at these levels forever and eventually I do think sales will begin to pick up again once the State of Emergency ends. But we now know we still have another 20+ days to go at a minimum for this.

Showing Activity – Are Buyers Still Out There Looking At Properties

This data was provided by Broker Bay and these numbers are Ontario wide, not just for the Toronto Condo Market. This is a look at the activity for showings Month of Month.

Not shockingly on a month-over-month basis, everything is WAY DOWN. The data above backs all of this up.

Week-over-week showing / offers / sold activity from BrokerBay

Where it gets interesting is there has been an increase in the number of showings this week vs. last week. To me what this says is that buyers who have been waiting since the beginning of the state of emergency are starting to get a bit antsy sitting cooped-up at home and want to get back out looking at properties again. Sold are down, but it will be very interesting to see what happens with this data next week and if some of these showings start to move the sales up.

This just gives an indication on how the current market compares to earlier this year.

The chart above is self explanatory and consistent with everything else above so I won’t really add anything to this but thought it was interesting to see just how much the market has slowed.

Condo Market Conclusions

The next few weeks will be very telling for where the Toronto condo market is headed and I don’t want to make any assumptions yet. There are some inherent challenges where many buildings are restricting access to outside people, meaning no showings can even happen, and a lot of buyers likely don’t feel comfortable heading out just yet, and for good reason. On top of that employment numbers are not good and while I think the government is trying to do everything they can to stop the economy from imploding, we still don’t know how that will play out. I still believe you shouldn’t be out looking unless you have to, and in more cases people need to sell much more than they NEED to buy which is a good indication of what is happening in the market right now.

I hope you found this information useful and if you have any questions feel free to contact me with any questions.



Until the next post, stay safe and healthy and we will get through this!