The CMHC recently released a report which attempts to predict the state of housing in our city next year.
The report is bullish, suggesting prices on average will rise by roughly 5% – taking the average home price to between 740-850K. By 2021, the CMHC thinks prices will hit almost 950K. These huge home prices are expected to be sustained even as the same report suggests that home construction numbers will rebound to levels at the time of the 2017 boom peak. The big factors which will underpin these price rises are the predicted strong gains in employment in Toronto, growing migration from other provinces, and growing levels of immigration to the city. The recently re-elected Liberal government will push the immigration level to over 400K, a move that is unlikely to be opposed by the Green Party or the NDP.
While housing starts (new home construction) are predicted to go up to as high as 36K units by 2020, this is still completely incapable of even remotely satiating demand. Only in late 2021 will pressure on the rental market begin to ease slightly, as the number of new units going online in the market is reaching multi-decade highs. This is sad news for the hundreds of thousands of Torontonians who are living in housing insecurity and who are dealing with bidding wars for rental units, a dream for landlords – who have never had it this good. In other words, don’t expect big changes, things will remain tight, competitive, and above all, expensive. Additionally, CMHC believes that mortgage payments will remain stable over the next years, suggesting that interest rates won’t be swinging widely up or down – this is one of the few good pieces of news in the report for prospective buyers and homeowners who are not interested in selling.
On the supply side, as we’ve written and explained many times, there’s simply very little capacity for builders to meet the huge demand needs we have. Toronto is building more high rises than any other city in North America, and much of our best land for low density suburban subdivisions has been eaten up. Even with the provincial government already pushing through anti-red tape deregulation measures that will benefit and speed up construction, there is not much that can be done unless all three levels of government come up with a serious, meaty, and very aggressive pro-development housing policy with strong incentives and specific targets. But this is unlikely. At the end of the day the factors which are keeping demand strong aren’t budging, and the forces preventing supply from growing massively aren’t present.