Welcome to 2014. We can safely claim to have survived another strong year in real estate despite what the doomsayers were hoping for. Still, the weather Gods continue to test our resolve. Remember the Summertime floods? It seems that no sooner had we dried out our basements that Toronto got hit with ICESTORM 2013. It looks like we will be paying for this one for a while too - frozen pipes, ice damage, downed trees. On a positive note, the kids are back at school and ice skating to work has never been better.

It should come as no surprise that our first market report of the year, carries with it the typical post-holiday statistics. While the Fall market was busy, sales tapered off slowly into late December. Freehold listings are down by nearly 50% from a month ago and while sales in the central core were as strong this week as they were last month, the bidding wars are less prevalent . Both east and west districts witnessed only about 1/4 of their usual sales activities. From our perspective, we see a lot of agents already preparing new listings for the market so this temporary “shortage” of new listings is not going to last.

As we have found out last year, the condominium market behaves much differently than its cousin the freehold market. This segment can change on a dime and take much of its directional influence from global financial trends. Clearly, investors form a significant portion of condo ownership in Toronto and these investors don’t concern themselves with seasonality. Listings across the core were only down 15% from a month ago but the number of sales remained uncharacteristically high. Recent reports predict as many as 20,000 new condo suites will be delivered in the city in 2014. We will be watching, with interest, to see what effect this will have on the overall health of the condo market.