Lies!

LIES, LIES, LIES!!!

I keep hearing about the risk of a huge unsold quantity of developer’s condo inventory. Well, here it is. It stands at 1000 units (according to CMHC/Urbanation). In a city with hundreds of thousands of built units, one thousand are unsold. Big deal. This represents less than 0.5% of the standing stock of condos and less than 5% of the annual sales of new units in the GTA. This means that once completed, developers have sold 95% of their project. This is an incredibly strong number. Why are we not talking about this, instead of all the misinformation that abounds in the media?

Another interesting CMHC/Urbanation statistic is the latest number of unsold preconstruction condos, which currently stands at slightly more than 10,000 units. This indicates the units unsold prior to a developer starting to build. This summarizes all the inventory at all development sites in all the condo projects (high-rise and low-rise) in the entire GTA. At 20,000 condo units sold every year, just 6 months of product is unsold at any one time. This too is a very strong number for the industry, but not talked about because of the media’s slant towards doom and destruction. Keep in mind that any development in Toronto needs to be 70% pre-sold to start, so the average development in the city is just 3 months away from being 70% sold.