Article content

Chander Chaddah remembers how crazy and irrational things appeared that day. He and a client went bank book to bank book with two other bidders in a bidding war to end all bidding wars, or so they thought, because what they thought at the time was: this is insane.

It was a house in a centrally located Toronto neighbourhood, with a big park and access to public transit nearby, and it was the fall of 1996, an era where bidding wars over houses were unheard of in the city.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or From a shotgun shack to a waterfront estate: What $1-million gets you in cities across Canada Back to video

Mr. Chaddah, a veteran realtor, expected his client to walk away with the $199,000, 2½-storey gem, for about $10,000 less than the asking price.

“My guy ended up paying $211,000 for it and he was really p—ed off,” he recalls.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or

Today, that poor guy’s house — and he still owns it — is worth well over $1-million. A monumental sum, only not so much in Toronto, where the average price — average price — for a detached home in the city proper officially hurdled over the $1-million mark ($1,040,018 to be precise) for the first time in a calendar month, according to the Toronto Real Estate Board.