Whenever there are headlines about real estate in the media, it is often unclear what market results they are sharing, or for what type of real estate the forecasts are focused upon. Sometimes the headline is about what happened to the average price across Canada in the past year, sometimes a forecast is about what’s coming next in Toronto – and sometimes it isn’t about any market or housing type in particular.
In early February 2025, we attended a Year in Review event put on by the good people at the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board. As you can imagine, lots of stats were discussed, forecasts were made and coffee was consumed.
We wanted to breakdown one particular segment of the stats across the GTA, namely housing type. The headlines we reference above are often focused on what’s happening, on average, in a given housing market. It is rare that these stories talk about what is happening with certain housing types, and make no mistake, there are significant differences in how certain types of homes did and what’s predicted to happen next.
Grab a cup of coffee and sit down as we walk you through what happened in 2024 for your housing type!
First off, what sort of places do people live in?
One thing that surprises many people is the actual percentages of housing types that make up a given market. We tend to make assumptions about the levels of housing types based on what we see in the neighbours in which we live and work, but the percentages for the area can be quite different.
Here’s the breakdown of percentages for each housing type in the seven areas of the GTA.
With the exception of Toronto, the most common housing type across the GTA is detached homes, followed by apartments. Toronto swaps the order of those two, but they remain the two most common housing types. Semi-detached homes and townhouses each make up only 5% to 12% of housing market across the GTA, so they are far less common than you might think.
We’re going to look at prices and sales across the GTA next, so we need to know how much each housing type make up for the GTA on average. Here are the numbers.
- Detached Houses: Approximately 45.5%
- Semi-Detached Houses: Approximately 8.5%
- Townhouses (Row Houses): Approximately 9.5%
- Apartments: Approximately 36.5%
In a pie chart, that looks like this.
Now that we know the breakdown of housing types in each part of the GTA and the GTA as a whole, let’s look at what happened in 2024!
We did it! We had (slightly) more sales in 2024!
Last year, we saw a slight increase in the level of homes sold, going up from about 65,900 in 2023 to about 67,600 in 2024. That’s about 1,700 more sales across the entirety of the GTA, so not exactly a huge difference.
As you can see from the line chart of sales per month, April was the busiest month last year and December came in as the slowest month of the year.
Those sales were spread across the GTA, but not evenly of course. Toronto saw the largest level of sales, while York and Peel more or less tied for second place. Durham and Halton each had a pretty significant level of sales but Simcoe was down near the bottom, and Dufferin was the least active market last year in terms of sales.
If we look at the types of homes that sold, we can see that almost half (46%) of homes sold last year were detached homes. That matches exactly the percentage of homes (46%) that detached homes make up of the housing mix. Apartments accounted for 28% of the sales last year, despite making up 36% of the housing mix, which means it was a slower year for apartment transactions. Townhouses made up 18% of the transactions in 2024, despite being just 10% of the housing mix, so it seems like people who were going to buy apartments opted for townhouses instead. Finally, semi-detached properties were 9% of the sales in 2024, and that’s exactly the percentage of the housing mix they have in the GTA.
Put it all together, and it seems like the sales of detached and semi-detached did what we would expect given the housing mix, but apartments and townhouses decided to switch places in 2024.
We did it! We had (marginally) more affordable prices in 2024!
On the average price side of the equation, we saw that we saw a slight drop in the average price across the GTA. It went from about $1.126M in 2023 down to about $1.117M in 2025. That’s about $9,000, so we’ll hold off on the ticker tape parade for now.
The highest average price of the year was in May of 2024, while the start of the year was the lowest.
Turning to the average price by home type, we see that detached homes lead the market, with an average price of $1.453M in the GTA. That’s down about $10K from 2023. Despite not making up much of the sales overall, semi-detached are the second highest price option, at $1.102M. That’s down about $12K from the year before. Townhouses saw the biggest actual price drop, going from $949K in 2023 to about $922K on average in 2024, a drop of about $27,000. This might account for the increase in townhouse sales relative to their percentage of the housing mix, as buyers saw an opportunity. Apartments dropped about $14K, going from $717K on average in 2023 to about $703K last year.
While no housing type showed an improvement in average price across the GTA in 2024 compared to 2023, it’s far from the housing crash that some pundits predicted would happen.
Let’s call 2024 the year of (trying to) selling your home.
Finally, if we look at the breakdown of new listings, we can see that we had a substantial increase in the level of properties going up for sale in 2024 compared to 2023. We had just over 166,000 listings come on the market last year and that is about 16% more than in 2023. That’s over 23,000 more new listings compared to 2023.
A reminder that we had 67,609 sales in 2024, which means that only about 41% of the new listings in 2024 actually sold. Even if some of those “new” listings were re-listings of properties that failed to sell, there were lots of sellers who wanted to find a buyer but didn’t manage to do so.
The percentages when it came to who was trying to sell last year are broadly in keeping with the housing mix percentages we see in the GTA, but townhouses were again a larger part of the mix than would be expected. They also were the biggest year over year increase in terms of how much of the market inventory they comprised, up 122% compared to the level in 2023.
From a simple numbers perspective, we had the most disappointed sellers in the condo apartment category, with about 9,000 more attempts to sell in 2024 than in 2023.
There you have it, 2024 in review! It wasn’t a banner year by pretty much any standard, but the review does tell us that where you live and the housing type you own makes a significant difference in how your market did last year.
If you’re thinking about making a move, then you need the specific data for your home and your area, and we’re happy to provide it. Get in touch with us and we can set a time to talk about how to move you forward!
