When we were starting our review of the latest batch of market stats from the good folks at the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB), something immediately stood out, namely the level of active listings in Toronto and the closest regions to Toronto.

In Toronto, Halton, Peel and York, we started May with the highest ever level of active listings (properties for sale) on the market. Durham was just 30 listings shy of their all time record high, so we’ll include the Durham region as well.

With more properties for sale than ever before, it’s worth doing a dive into how this happened and specifically what types of properties are for sale now, and at what price points?

Let’s get into it.

How’d this happen?

We’re going to answer the question of how did this happen from a technical standpoint, rather than a philosophical one! There are many factors influencing why the year so far has played out this way, but the below chart is a very clear explanation as to how we ended up with this record level of active listings in the city.

Let’s work our way across.

The first blue column is the number of active listings as of the end of December, 2024. We had 6,300 active listings in Toronto as of the start of 2025.

Over the next four months, we had 23,873 new listings come on the market. That’s the green column.

During the same time period we had 1,001 suspensions (the first red bar), which is when a listing is put on hold by the seller. Now, this is supposed to be a temporary measure, for example if a seller is ill and can’t allow showings for a week. Some suspensions are genuine, but in our experience, the majority of them are actually no longer for sale. The listing agent suspended the listing and never bothered to do the paperwork to get it properly terminated.

From January to end of April, we also had 2,285 expirations (the 2nd red bar), which are listings that reached the end of the agreed upon listing period and automatically expired.

Our third red bar is transactions, which means sales. We had 7,222 sales in Toronto in the first four months of the year. That’s a bit low, but not shockingly low compared to historical data. In 2024 and 2023 we had about 8,700 sales in the first four months, so we’re down about 1,500 sales, or about 18% lower.

Our fourth and final red bar is terminations, and we had 9,003 in the first four months of 2025. We know for certain that some of those terminations (and indeed some of the expirations and even suspensions) would have come back onto the market and shown up as a “new” listing during the year so far.

As a result of where we started (with 6,300 active listings), what came on the market (about 24,000 new listings), what came off the market (about 19,500 through suspensions, expirations, sales and terminations), we started May, 2025 with 10,662 active listings.

So, there’s the “most ever” of every type of property for sale?

When we get into the specifics of what is on the market, we see nuances to the current market composition.

Every geographic area has a different composition and we’ll review Toronto to give an example of how it looks when we dig deeper.

The below chart shows the active listings in Toronto by property type.

Three types of housing make up 87% of the homes for sale right now. Condo apartment units are the biggest piece of the pie, with 57% of the record level of active listings being condo units. Detached houses make up the next biggest slice and are 23% of the active listings in Toronto. The third largest type of property in the pie is condo townhouses, which represents 7% of the active inventory right now.

The remaining 13% is spread across a few different types of property. First off is Other at 5%, which is comprised of a broad mix of properties including parking spots, vacant land and other specific subsets of residential real estate. Then we have semi-detached houses, which only make up about 4.5% of the active inventory. Freehold townhouses are next and represent about 2.3% of the market. Coop housing and linked freehold homes represent the other tiny slices in the pie chart.

When we look into the historical levels of active listings for the three biggest slices of the pie right now, there are some surprising results.

• For condo apartment units, we have about 6,050 condo units for sale, which is not quite the highest ever. June 2024 and July 2024 both had slightly higher levels, but we’re within 100 of the June 2024 record high of 6,147 condo units for sale.
• Turning to detached houses, we have 2,534 of them for sale in Toronto. That is the highest ever, beating the previous record holder, September 2024, when we had 2,389 detached houses on the market.
• Condo townhouses are also currently at a record high, with 708 condo townhouse properties on the market in Toronto. The previous record holder was October 2024 when there were 680 condo townhouses for sale.

It is surprising that despite the number of headlines about the condo market problems in Toronto, we don’t actually have the highest level of units for sale that we’ve ever seen. At the same time, we’re not seeing many media outlets picking up on the fact that the holy grail of Toronto properties, the detached house, is seeing its highest ever level of inventory right now.

An important component to the story is which price points are seeing the highest levels of inventory, so let’s dig into that now.

What’s your budget? It definitely still matters.

When we look at how the inventory on the market is spread out across different price ranges, you see a few places where you’ve got more options.

There’s a few things worth noting about the above chart.

• The biggest concentration of inventory is for sale in the $500K to $599K band, with over 1,500 options if that’s your budget.
• After that, we jump up to over $2M, with almost 1,200 options if your budget is north of two million.
• The next most sizeable grouping is in the $600K to $699K range, with over 1,200 options.

Looking at this breakdown, you’d be right if you said that a buyer with a budget in the $500K to $700K range has tons of options right now. The question, however, is what type of options? If we look at active listings by price range within our two biggest segments, the story becomes more nuanced.

For condo apartment units for sale right now, here’s the active listings by price range.

We pointed out how you’ve got a lot of options in the $500K to $599K range, with over 1,500 properties for sale in that band. Given that the condo apartment breakdown shows 1,417 options in that price band, we know that almost all of your options for that buying budget are in fact condo units.

If we switch over to the detached houses for sale by price range, here’s the chart.

The $2M plus budget is well represented in the detached house segment of the market, with 854 of the available 2,187 detached houses costing more than $2M.

Other nuances of this segment show up in this chart, such as the fact that there more than twice as many detached houses for sale in the $900K to $999K range as there are in the $800K to $899K range. This is very useful information if you’re a buyer looking for a detached home for under $900K in the city. If you didn’t know that the concentration of detached houses increases rapidly above this price point, you’d likely be confused about the fact that there are more detached homes than ever for sale right now – but not many in your budget.

In our work with clients, we dive deep into the stats to understand what is going on in specific markets. We may start with a given geography, but we dive deep into housing types and price bands to make sure the advice we’re giving is reflective of what’s going on for the type of property you’re trying to buy or sell. If you’re ready to make a move and want us to help figure out the best strategy for your purchase or sale, get in touch!

There is a quote we often reference on the team, and it goes like this.

“There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics”.

It has been attributed to Mark Twain, who himself attributed it to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, who might never have said it in the first place.

Regardless of the source, we periodically quote it, particularly around the start of the month, when the latest round of real estate statistics is published by our friends at TRREB, the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board.  We absolutely believe that the data that is published is accurate, so we’re not questioning that aspect.

The reason we reference that quote is more to do with the headlines that start appearing around this time.  TRREB provides tons of data each month in the form of a Market Watch Report, which is disseminated to media outlets, who then decide what data points make an interesting story.

These headlines often take the complicated market stats and come up with a simple statement that, when you dig into it, is either inaccurate or flat wrong.  Sometimes this is because the media wants a more interesting story to push, and other times it is because the stats themselves can be misunderstood or wrongly interpreted.

It’s early January, 2025, so we now have the stats for the December, 2024 market, which means we also have the full stats for last year.  Let’s go over the three biggest lies – uh, we mean, flawed interpretations of the data – and what it actually means.

It’s just a bit off, by that we mean, the exact opposite.

Let’s talk about prices for a bit.

The default standard for talking about real estate prices is the average price, which is simply the number of sales divided by the total dollar value of sales.  If you had 10 sales that equal ten million dollars, the average sale price is $1M.  If you had 10 sales that totals twenty million dollars, the average sale price is $2M, and so forth.

If you look at any headlines out there in January, 2025, they will be saying that the average price in the GTA went down 1.6% in the past year.  It was approximately $1,084,000 in December, 2023 and it was about $1,067,000 in December, 2024.  That means, on average, prices went down in the GTA by about $17,000.  Got it.

Now, the average is a good measure of the total scope of data. It’s the most commonly used measure but it can be misleading when data is skewed or has outliers. For example, if a few multi-millionaires are included in a set of household incomes, the average income will be higher than reality.

So, is our housing data skewed?  Well, if we look at what sales took place in different price bands in the data, it definitely isn’t equally distributed.  In both December of 2023 and December of 2024, about 54% of sales were under $1 million, about 39% were between $1 million and $2 million and about 7% were over $2 million.  That means, our real estate data is skewed to a moderate extent, and about 70% of the total sales take place in a price range between $600K to $1.5M.

In instances where data is skewed, the median, or the middle number of the data set, is a better measure to use.  Going back to our example of 10 sales that equal $10M, for a $1M average, what if we looked and found that nine of the sales were for $800K and one was for $2.8M.  That averages to $1M, but the data is skewed with a high outlier at the top end for that $2.8M sale.  The median, or medium number would be $800K, which is more representative of the actual typical price.

If the average sale price in the GTA has gone down 1.6% in the last year, losing about $17,500 in value, what about the median sale price?  It turns out, that is a very different story, in fact, pretty much the opposite.

The median sale price in December, 2024 was $930,000, which is about 13% lower than the average price.  If we look back in December, 2023, the median sale price was $908,750, which means that prices went up by about 2.3% in the last year.

This shows how it absolutely matters how statistics are interpreted and which measures are used.  In this case, prices have gone down on average by $17,500 in the past year, but our dataset is skewed, which means the median is a better measure to use, which shows prices have gone up by over $21,000 in the past year.  Damn statistics.

It just takes two weeks longer than we say it does.  What’s the big deal?

Our next example of how statistics can be misleading comes to us in the form of the days on market.  Don’t worry, we’re not going to talk about average or median in this case.

Instead, we’re going to point out one of our favourite gripes about our market data, which is that the length of time it takes for properties to sell uses what is called Listing Days on Market, or LDOM.  If a house goes up for sale on January 1^st and sells January 10^th, that means the listing was on the market for 10 days and it took 10 days to sell.  Pretty clear, right?  Take all of the properties that have sold in a month or year and you get the average days on market, or how long it takes real estate to get sold.

In the GTA, it took, on average, 25 days for a property to sell last year.  That’s the average for all housing types, all price points, across all parts of the GTA, but it does give us an idea of how quickly (or slowly) the market is moving.  We can compare the 25 days it took on average to sell in 2024 with the 19 days it took on average in 2023 and say pretty firmly that it was a slower year.

The problem with the Listing Days on Market has to do with the fact that the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board allows properties to be listed, terminated, and then relisted.  This can be done as many times as a seller and their agent want to, so it radically skews the accuracy of our days on market stats.

In our previous example of a home that took 10 days to sell based on the listing going up January 1^st and selling January 10^th, what if that wasn’t their first listing of the home?  What if it was listed October 15^th for a higher price and it didn’t sell?  What if it was relisted November 24^th for a lower price and still didn’t sell?  If that home sold January 10^th after two previous listings, the 10 days on market isn’t actually accurate.  In fact, if we look at the property days on market (or PDOM), it was actually on the market for 87 days.  This PDOM stat takes all of the recent listings and combines them to get a days on market that is reflective of how long it actually took the property to sell.

A large number of listings in the GTA have more than one listing attempt, which means that the listing days on market, which is the stat that is used in the media to describe how quick or slow a market is these days, is often wildly inaccurate.

To prove that, the average listing days on market in the GTA was 25 days in 2024, but the average property days on market was 38 days.  That’s 13 days longer, or almost two weeks longer.  Back in 2023, the average listing days on market in the GTA was 19 days and that went up to 28 days for the PDOM.  While it took longer in 2024 to sell than it did in 2023 by both metrics, if we compare the LDOM, it was 6 days slower, versus the PDOM, where it was 10 days slower.  When we’re talking days, an additional four days is a significant slow down, so the media stories about the slow real estate market last year are actually understating how much slower it was to transact in 2024.  Say it with us, damn statistics.

Tale of Two Townhouse Territories

The final example we’ll give about how statistics can be misleading has to do with the danger of taking an overall stat and applying it to any given subset of the data.

While we previously challenged the accuracy of the average sale price that is used in headlines, let’s look at how even if it was accurate in general, how egregiously wrong it can become when you apply it to specific housing types and market areas.

Here’s the chart from the Market Watch report with the sales and average price by major home type, including the year over year change.

You’ll note we’ve circled the Townhouse statistics, as it gives us a great example of how using the average statistics can be plain wrong when it comes to a specific subset of the data.

The average price (not the median) went down in the GTA by 1.6% in 2024 when you compare December 2024 to December 2023.  If you owned a townhouse, however, the average price dropped by just 0.3% in the past year.  Go deeper into the stats though, and you’ll see that in Toronto (the 416), the average price for a townhouse went down 18.2% in the past year, whereas the average price outside of Toronto (the 905) went up by 4.7%!

The moral of the story is that before you celebrate or shake your head in disgust at the average increase or decrease in real estate prices according to the latest headlines, think about whether that average is at all accurate when it comes to your home.  Odds are pretty good that it will be a very different story for your home compared to what is happening on average!

We love data, but we’re also very aware that statistics can be misleading.  Whenever we work with buyer or seller clients, we make sure to understand what is going on in the specific subset of the market they are transacting in – and we use that data to get our clients the best results.  If you like the sound of that, get in touch to discuss how we can help move you forward.

In any profession, there are some pieces of common wisdom that get trotted out in answer to certain questions.  In the real estate industry, one of the most common questions is “When is the best time to buy or sell real estate?” and the answer is actually very nuanced.

First and foremost, the best time to buy real estate is likely the worst time to sell real estate.  If that question really means “When can I buy the best property for the least amount of money?”, you can see how that question’s answer would be very different to the answer to “When can I sell property for the most amount of money?”.

If we decided to parse the question that way and answer both questions, it only leads to more revisions to what is actually being asked.  For both buying and selling, the “best time” varies depending on a number of factors.  Whether it is type of property, price point, geography, or attributes of properties, an accurate answer needs to focus on the specifics of those real estate markets.

For example, selling a $2M home with a gorgeous backyard oasis and a large pool is “best” done in late Spring or early Summer, in an economy where buyers in that price point are looking to move up to a new level of luxury.  Contrast that to a $500K condo located close to a university, where the “best” time is likely mid-to-late summer when students (or more accurately students’ parents) or investors are on the hunt for properties that will make good income properties in the years to come.

Given the challenges with determining the “best” real estate market, we thought we’d focus on a more defined question, namely when is the slowest time of year for real estate sales?  We get that question a lot, often based on the assumption that low levels of sales means good buying opportunities and poor selling timing.  While that is also very dependent on the type of property, prices, location and the ever present levers of supply and demand, we can definitely answer when sales are lowest – and highest.

With 2025 now a couple of days old, we thought we’d look at the data for the past five years to answer the question for you.  We don’t have the full 2024 data as of yet, but we can make some educated guesses as to how the year ended.  Let’s get to the charts!

Boy, things slowed down in the last couple of years.

The first chart we pulled together shows the level of sales per year we’ve seen in 2024 (January to November to be precise) and for the last five years.

The below is for all real estate sales taking place with the GTA through the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board’s MLS system.  As such, this includes both Freehold as well as Condo sales in Toronto, Peel, York, Durham, Halton, Simcoe and Dufferin.

You’ll note that 2024 had just over 64,000 sales as of the end of November, and with just one month left, it is probably likely that the year just squeaked over 2023 in terms of level of sales.  While December is never a busy month, 2023 had just under 66,000 sales, and we’re betting that we’ll see more than 2,000 sales in the GTA in December.  While 2024 may be slighter higher sales than 2023, that doesn’t mean much, as 2023 was the lowest level of sales in the prior five years.

You’ll note that from 2019 through to 2021, we had a huge run up in sales.  Despite a dip during the start of COVID in 202, the year ended up mean very busy by historical standards, and then that was blown out of the water by 2021, with over 121,000 sales across the GTA.  Things started to go downhill in 2022 and 2023 and (likely) 2024 saw about half of the 2021 level of sales.

I’m here for the data.  Spill!

While the overall level of sales last year and the prior five years is interesting, we promised an answer to the slowest month of the year.  We threw in the highest month of the year as well for the same time period, and the answers are not fully consistent.

Remember, the chart below is for all of the GTA, including both Freehold and Condo sales, but the stats for 2024 don’t include December’s numbers yet.

With the exception of 2020’s COVID slowdown, when April was the slowest month of the year, the lowest level of sales across the GTA has taken place in either January or December for the past six years.  While the data for 2024 currently has January as the slowest month, with just over 4,000 sales, we’re actually predicting that December will take the bottom spot for 2024.

Regardless, you can see that the end of the year and start of the year are not busy times for real estate generally.  Sales tend to be in the 3,000 level of transactions, with 2021 (the record high year for real estate transactions in the GTA) coming in at over 6,000 sales in December, the slowest month of the year.

Contrast that with the busiest month of the year, which typically (but not always) happens in the Spring.  Both 2022 and 2021 saw the highest level of sales in March, but 2023 and 2019 hit their annual busiest month height in May.  During the start of COVID in 2020, we had an extremely slow Spring and Summer, but the Fall came back in high numbers, and September was the busiest month in 2020.

While we don’t have the December data yet for 2024, we are certain that April 2024 will win for busiest month of last year.  As we mention, we think that December 2024 may end up being the slowest month of the year, but there is no way it will beat April’s 7,000 sales.

We love diving into the stats and turning numbers into insights.  If you are thinking about buying or selling, don’t rely on what’s happening on average, talk to us about what is happening in your market, for the type of home you’re curious about!