There are two simple truths that we learned last week; Kanye West is NOT a Canadian and Toronto’s real estate market turned in another gold medal performance. Sure, things are slowing down a bit but that’s more a seasonal tendency. What catches our eye is the fact that while listings are way down in both the freehold and condo sectors, sales are only down a little. Clearly demand is still raging downtown but supply continues to be the major issue.

Nowhere is the supply and demand conundrum more evident than in the freehold sector where supply is down 19% from the week earlier and sales backed off by 6.7%. While that 12.3% spread is significant, we also noticed that fewer homes were selling in multiple offers. Our agents are reporting less competition at the offer table which leads us to conclude that many buyers are taking a temporary hiatus from the market. This is especially evident in the $1.5M+ market across the downtown core where sales have backed off over 42% from a week earlier.

The condo sector is exhibiting the same traits as the freehold sector with a drop of 9.4% in available listings compared to the previous week. We found it interesting to note that while the overall decline in the number of sales was 3.3%, that decline came from the east and west core of the city. In the central core there was actually a 20% increase in sales volume from the previous week primarily in the $400k-$700k price range.