One type of Toronto property still in hot demand amid troubled market

Toronto area condos may have lost their once-alluring sheen for prospective homeowners (especially investors), but another segment of the city's real estate market is still seeing growing demand.

Defying the persistent trend of subdued buying that has swept the region during the last year-plus, an increasing number of townhomes are changing hands, making it the hottest property type on the GTA residential market as of December 2024.

Multiple reports on the state of things say as much, including one from industry data firm Zonda Urban, released on Thursday.

Calling the last few months of 2024 "the best quarter in two years" for GTHA townhouses, the group notes that sales for ground-related townhomes, in particular, are booming relative to dwindling condo transactions.

Last week, Royal LePage also noted a resurgence of the townhome market in its latest Home Price Update & Market Forecast, with one Toronto area broker noting that "activity in the townhome segment is currently leading the market due to the property type's relative affordability."

"Meanwhile, condominium sales have continued to stagnate," that release continued.

Similarly, in its own outlook for the year, RE/MAX executives wrote that first-time homebuyers are the key demographic they expect to drive sales numbers across Canada this year — and, notably, that many of them are "looking for townhomes and small residential properties such as bungalows."

Townhomes may not have outperformed other housing types when it came to the actual number of sales in December 2024, but it saw the biggest uptick in buyer interest compared to the same time the year prior, with a sharper increase in transactions than detached houses, semi-detached houses, and condos.

All expert perceptions and predictions aside, the numbers don't lie: figures from December 2024, courtesy of the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB)'s monthly Market Watch, show there were 5.8 per cent more townhome sales across the 416 and 905 area codes last month than in December 2023.

Comparatively, condo sales in the region climbed slightly, by 1.7 per cent (balanced by a surge in the 905, as there were 4.7 per cent fewer sales year-over-year in Toronto proper), while detached and semi-detached home sales declined 5.8 per cent and 9.8 per cent year-over-year, respectively.