A year ago, the Toronto region real estate market was so hot builders were towing cars to try to control the crowding at their sales centres.

That’s the environment in which Dionne Thompson bought a house in Mattamy Homes’ Queen’s Common development in Whitby last January.

Fast forward 12 months, and Thompson and her future neighbours say they have been devastated to learn that their builder is selling nearly identical houses for significantly less money.

Mattamy, the country’s largest home builder, says the buyers are victims of a softer housing market in recent months, and pre-construction homes are vulnerable to those conditions in the same way as resale houses.

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Thompson, a bus driver, bought her two-storey, detached house as a nest to share with her husband, her children and grandchildren.

She says she paid $955,000 for a 2,749-sq.-ft. detached house. Last month Mattamy began selling the same model on a similar lot for about $859,000 in Queen’s Common Phase 2.

“I wish I could walk away from it because it’s just too much money,” Thompson said.

Mariam Boni was among the buyers caught up in Toronto’s scorching property market last January. She says she got an email from Mattamy when the first phase of the development was released. On the appointed date, she waited three hours in line to get a ticket to return to the sales centre the following day.

When she went back, there were only two lots still available and Boni ended up spending $899,000, plus additional money for upgrades, exceeding her target price of $500,000 to $600,000.

Although she owns a home already, she said Queen’s Common would be a better place to raise her son.

“No one understands until they’re in your shoes. At the time it was rushed. I have a 3-year-old. I’m thinking about his future, I’m thinking this is a good investment. It’s going to go up in price, I’m going to do something nice for my child,” she said.

Mattamy president Brad Carr said the company encourages buyers to look at their homes as a long-term investment. But he understands the disappointment.

Prices in Queen’s Common, a community of about 600 back-to-back and traditional town homes and detached houses near Highway 412 and McQuay Blvd., are generally six to eight per cent lower than a year ago, he said.

“For so many buyers in the marketplace today the upswing has been so long and sustained that it has potentially created the false impression that real estate only goes in one direction,” Carr said.

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“When (the market) is moving upwards, we obviously raise our prices and when it’s moving downwards, in order to continue to sell and to build and complete the communities, we have to lower our prices to a price point the market will bear,” he said.

When a community is built in a number of phases over a period of years, there are going to be ups and downs in the prices, Carr said.

He said Mattamy tried to mitigate the Phase 2 buyers’ disappointment by offering them a chance in December to increase their deposit up to $30,000, depending on the home, in exchange for reducing the cost of their homes an equal amount.

But Thompson, who says she struggled to find the $90,000 for her down payment, was maxed out.

When her son died suddenly a week after she bought in Queen’s Common, she was faced with unexpected funeral costs. The sale of an investment property in April, for more than $900,000, did not close when the buyer backed out. She recently sold it for about $200,000 less than the deal that fell through.

Carr says Mattamy’s labour, materials and development costs are rising at the same time the Toronto-area housing market has fallen into a lull after the frenzied buying of 2016 and early 2017.

Buyers don’t realize, he said, that when someone buys a new construction home, the risk transfers from the builder to the buyer once the contract is signed, not on the closing date when the house is actually built.

“In a rising market, (buyers) love that. They talk about it all the time, they share that news with their friends — they’re feeling very excited about the fact that they haven’t moved in yet and their house is worth more than they paid for it,” Carr said.

He says buyers experienced similar drops in value during the financial crisis of 2008.

Hugh Heron, principal of another builder, Herity Homes, says Mattamy’s pricing must be based on business factors. But, he said, he has not heard of such a practice in the five decades he has been in the business.

“No one in the industry understands why they did it,” Heron said.

He said he can’t recall a time when builders have reduced pre-construction home prices, although he added that it may have happened around the global economic recession of the early 1980s when the government was offering incentives to get the home building business back on its feet.

The Ontario Home Builders Association said CEO Joe Vaccaro was not available for comment.