Bought a condo in 2020? If it's in Toronto, it likely underperformed your savings account

Yahoo

5 days ago

For the past five years, a high-interest savings account has been a better bet than a Toronto condominium. While condo values have soared in every other major Canadian city since 2020, Toronto's market has slumped, delivering returns that barely break even and leaving it as the undisputed laggard of the national housing market.
Benchmark pricing data from the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) show a condo purchased in Toronto at the start of 2020 is now worth around 3.75 per cent more than it was five years ago.
Over the same time period, condos in other major Canadian cities have gone up 16 per cent or more. Economic factors, migration, affordability and particularities of local inventory help account for variation in market trends for condos in different cities. In Halifax and Quebec City, smaller markets where housing supply has lately been limited, prices have gone up by almost 90 and 60 per cent, respectively.
Regardless, by almost any measure, Toronto has drastically underperformed. In a June interview, John Pasalis, president of Toronto-based brokerage Realosophy, told Yahoo Finance Canada 'demand is at the lowest level it's been in 20 years.'
Most markets experienced a price correction following pandemic-era peaks, but none have been as pronounced or as enduring as in Toronto. In Halifax, Quebec City, Montreal, Calgary and Saskatoon, the pandemic was at worst a bump in the road for condo values. Prices in Ottawa and Victoria remain slightly below their peaks but comfortably above their January 2020 benchmarks.
In Toronto, the market has fallen more or less steadily from its peak in March 2022, when the benchmark condo price hit $716,100, up nearly 29 per cent from $555,600 in January 2020, CREA data show.
In June this year, a benchmark Toronto condo costs $576,400. Considered as an investment, a typical Toronto unit bought in January 2020 and sold in June 2025 would have delivered a compound annual growth rate of 0.46 per cent — less than the returns offered by many banks' high-interest savings accounts.
Even such a decline, however, has done little to solve Toronto's affordability crisis. Condo prices have dropped almost 20 per cent from their 2022 peak, but a benchmark unit in Toronto is still the second-most expensive in Canada, behind Vancouver. A benchmark condo in Halifax has nearly doubled since the start of 2020, but is still roughly $100,000 cheaper than one in Toronto.
A comparison of condo markets in Toronto and Halifax only goes so far, given the difference in population, but there are some interesting insights around supply. A building boom in Toronto, driven in part by low interest rates, is a key factor in the current oversupply — with unsold inventory in record territory. In Halifax, condo supply is virtually non-existent, with a single pre-construction condo building on the market, according to Chris Perkins, a broker-owner at Coldwell Banker Maritime Realty.
"The vast majority of cranes you see in the air (there are a lot) are building rental apartments," Perkins said in an email to Yahoo Finance Canada. "This is partly due to the fact that the current marketable value for a condominium unit in Halifax does not make financial sense for a developer to build. The government offers a 15 per cent HST rebate to developers to build an apartment building, but this does not extend to condominiums and greatly impacts the viability of a project."
There have been 365 condo sales in the city this year, Perkins says — versus nearly 4,000 in Toronto in the first quarter of 2025.
Many prospective condo buyers in Halifax are older and have paid off the mortgages on their homes, Perkins says, with those homes worth nearly 90 per cent more than they were in 2020 on average. 'Not all of them want to rent, and the options for a sizeable 1,200+ square foot condo are severely limited,' Perkins said. 'Lots of equity competing for condominiums in limited supply.'
Edmonton's recent performance could offer some insights for Toronto, with the same caveats around city size. Edmonton was the only major city to show negative price growth through the pandemic, though it has since rebounded. The city's slide actually began around 2013, with oversupply a key factor — perhaps offering a cautionary tale for Toronto, where a similar glut of inventory now threatens to prolong its market downturn.
John MacFarlane is a senior reporter at Yahoo Finance Canada. Follow him on X @jmacf.
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