The Canadian Housing and Mortgage Corporation (CHMC) put out a warning this month that Toronto real estate prices are starting to put off bubblicious signs (our words, not there’s). They cited the sharp rise in single-family detached homes to be the single biggest warning, so we wanted to see if that effected the whole city – naturally we used our mad cartography skills to map it.

Continued strong price increases in the fourth quarter of 2015 reflects an increased share of higher priced low rise home sales, particularly of single-detached homes. — Housing Market Assessment, 2Q 2016

Toronto Real Estate Map

The above map shows each standard Toronto ward, and a color graph indicating the average percentage price increase from April 2015 to April 2016. Note that we only mapped “single-family detached homes”, which are the exact condition the CHMC cited as the problem.

Observations

There are a few spots that aren’t increasing as quickly, but even the prices of those in the cooler wards are outpacing core inflation by ~300% – the hottest ward is beating inflation by a whopping 1000%!

Short of having a crystal ball, anyone that says “this is the top of the market” or “it can’t go lower” are just plain guessing – and guessing probably isn’t enough to stop you from buying a home if you were already in the market for one. The exact words however from the CMCH are “strong signs of problematic conditions” are starting to surface, and claimed Toronto is seeing the same conditions as the late 1980s. Being a millennial myself I was in diapers during the 80’s so I had to look it up – turns out prices declined a whopping 40-50% in 1989-1996, with the average mortgage rates going up to 12.7%.

So is a crash on our horizon? Let us know what you think in the comments.