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New Canadian Politics Thread

JackBurton said:
Why are we developing so many condos? Where I live it's the hottest area around Toronto for condos and it's nuts how many they are building. I'd really worry about buying one.


View: https://x.com/blogTO/status/1834257756645163349
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Have a friend who bought pre-construction and moved in. Couple years in the place now and he is married with a kid and wants to sell and couldn't, barely any showings.

This is in a prime location as well.
 
JackBurton said:
Why are we developing so many condos? Where I live it's the hottest area around Toronto for condos and it's nuts how many they are building. I'd really worry about buying one.


View: https://x.com/blogTO/status/1834257756645163349
Click to expand...


It's a bit of a perfect storm clusterfuck really between:

- Zoning
- Public safety laws
- Financing requirements
- high land costs
- Lack of skilled labour

To put it simply, there's no lower or middle end options in Toronto as a builder. Building medium density in residential areas where the land is a bit more reasonably priced is out because of zoning, so when there is an available parcel of land in a corridor zoned for medium density your ROI on a 4-6 floor building is lower than it is if you build 30 floors elsewhere (height restrictions vary across the city), so financing on a tower project that costs way less per sq ft of total building space is easier to get than for a mid density project outside of the downtown core.

Then throw into the mix that smaller construction firms who might be interested in doing retrofits to put residential above old street facing commercial in transit corridors are competing with firms flush with bank money to build inner core condo towers, and are competing with them in limited labour pool for skilled trades need to build anything at all which makes project planning much harder, projects take much longer when you can get them off the ground, and the projects themselves much more sensitive to a small handful of skilled tradespeople leaving your job for more money elsewhere.
 
trujaysfan said:
Have a friend who bought pre-construction and moved in. Couple years in the place now and he is married with a kid and wants to sell and couldn't, barely any showings.

This is in a prime location as well.
Click to expand...
There's just too many. You'll always have more than enough available for people looking to buy. I see so few actual houses on the market.
In Pickering it's nuts. Centrecourt is developing I think 8-10 high-rise near the Go station, and there's a bunch of other nearby areas that are either being built, or have completed in the past 2 years.
 
MindzEye said:
It's a bit of a perfect storm clusterfuck really between:

- Zoning
- Public safety laws
- Financing requirements
- high land costs
- Lack of skilled labour

To put it simply, there's no lower or middle end options in Toronto as a builder. Building medium density in residential areas where the land is a bit more reasonably priced is out because of zoning, so when there is an available parcel of land in a corridor zoned for medium density your ROI on a 4-6 floor building is lower than it is if you build 30 floors elsewhere (height restrictions vary across the city), so financing on a tower project that costs way less per sq ft of total building space is easier to get than for a mid density project outside of the downtown core.

Then throw into the mix that smaller construction firms who might be interested in doing retrofits to put residential above old street facing commercial in transit corridors are competing with firms flush with bank money to build inner core condo towers, and are competing with them in limited labour pool for skilled trades need to build anything at all which makes project planning much harder, projects take much longer when you can get them off the ground, and the projects themselves much more sensitive to a small handful of skilled tradespeople leaving your job for more money elsewhere.
Click to expand...
weirdly in hali right now all the developers are mostly all-in on mid-rises.

dunno the exact details that make this the most lucrative thing to build, but my planner friend in HRM says that is the case...
 
Wayward DP said:
weirdly in hali right now all the developers are mostly all-in on mid-rises.

dunno the exact details that make this the most lucrative thing to build, but my planner friend in HRM says that is the case...
Click to expand...

Lower upfront project costs, faster project turnover, harder to get financing on but easier to hit the pre sale targets to unlock the next tranche of money once you've got a lending partner involved. There's a lot to like about them as projects for a construction firm, they're profitable. Just not as profitable as a condo project in downtown Toronto in 2020-2021 when you were pitching investors. The imbalance in Toronto will sort itself out eventually and a bunch of low rise/mid rise stuff will go up around every transit station in the GTA before all is said and done. Going to be a painful 10-15 years before it happens though.
 
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