It’s Oakville.
I was going to do a big build up and tell you at the end of the post, but it’s Friday, it’s lovely out and if you came to my site, you deserve the immediate answer.
Now that you have that little dopamine hit from getting immediate gratification, I’ll explain how I arrived at this answer.
The lovely people at the Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB) have divided the GTA into seven broad geographic areas. The areas are:
- Toronto
- Peel
- York
- Durham
- Simcoe
- Dufferin
- Halton
Any Realtor who is a member of TREB has access to listings (current and historical) as well as all the market data that TREB shares with its members.
We hear a lot in the news about average sale prices across the GTA, and those media stories are drawn from the news releases from TREB in most cases. If you look at the map below, you can see that TREB’s definition of the GTA is broader than what most of us might use. In practice this means that when the average is calculated, it includes the mansion in Toronto’s Bridlepath area as well as the one bedroom cottage in Penetanguishene.
I often have clients ask where are the best areas to buy. While the answer depends on their particular circumstances, I thought it would be interesting to review what the best performing areas in this large GTA area have been over the last year.
When we look at which area has seen the highest increase is average sale price from May, 2015 to May, 2016, the best real estate market in the GTA has been Halton, with an average sale price increase of 24% over the past year.
Interestingly enough, the worst has been Toronto at only (!) 9% year over year average sale price increase, across all housing types. This is a great example of how a diverse housing stock and a wide variation in the bottom and top of the market can result in average sale price increase that is lower.
If we dig a little deeper, we see that Oakville is the leading municipality in the Halton region, and its 24% average sales price increase just barely edged out Burlington. Within Oakville, the big winner were owners of detached homes, who saw the average sale price go up over 28% in the last year.
Digging into numbers may not be the most exciting of Friday pastimes, but it is really useful for understanding what is going on in the real estate market. If you want to see a table with all of the average sale price increases for each area, here it is.
Source: Toronto MLS, Average Sale Price, All Housing Types
If you or someone you like are considering selling your home, and you want to start the process with an understanding of how your area is doing compared to the media stories you see, please get in touch. I’d love to be responsible for what comes next.
Regards,
Jeff
PUBLIC OUTDOOR ROOM
In every neighbourhood and work community, make a piece of the common land into an outdoor room – a partly enclosed place, with some roof, columns, without walls, perhaps with a trellis; place it beside an important path and within view of many homes and workshops.
I showed a client a condo this week that had designed a shallow, man made lake with a number of common areas in the inner courtyard. The condo building overlooked this lovely scene and there were even a half dozen townhouses that had “docks” that went directly onto this lake. Whether it is for use or for strictly ornamental purposes, such features are appealing to buyers and residents. When public spaces are designed around such pleasant features, they are used and add value to the community.