Last week I sat down with a young man, married, late thirties, wrestling with the same question I hear more than any other right now: should I buy or should I wait?
His math was the math everyone is doing. Rent a great place for a year. Watch the market. If prices drift lower, he comes out ahead, and if they don’t, he hasn’t lost much. We used to talk about FOMO, the fear of missing out. Today’s buyer has the opposite condition. Call it the fear of moving first. Nobody wants to buy on Tuesday and read on Thursday that they could have done better.
Here is my honest answer, and it may surprise you coming from someone in my chair… he could be right. I cannot promise anyone that the market will be higher next year, and I am suspicious of anyone who does. What I told him instead is that he is asking the wrong question, because he is not buying an investment; he is buying a home.
Those are different things, and we have let a decade of headlines blur them together. An investment property is a financial calculation, simple math. A home is where your life happens while the market does whatever the market does. If you own your home for ten years, there will be years it is up and years it is down, and none of it is real until the day you sell. It is a paper win or a paper loss. What is real, every single day, is that it is yours. Nobody is raising your rent. Nobody’s daughter is moving in, with 60 days’ notice for you to pack.
Perspective helps here. Over the past decade, the average Toronto area home has appreciated at roughly 4% a year, compounded, even after the correction from the 2022 peak. On a principal residence, that growth is tax-free. That is not a promise about the next decade. It is simply a reminder that the people who did well in Toronto real estate were rarely the ones who timed it. They were the ones who lived it.
The backdrop for this decision is also shifting. This month, the federal and provincial governments committed $1.5 billion to cut development charges on new Toronto homes, fees that can reach 20% on the cost of a new home. This is on top of an HST rebate that’s already trimming the price of new homes for sale today. And, of course, the resale market has been firming on its own. Just this morning, we read that June sales rose more than 9% year-over-year, that new listings fell for a fifth consecutive month, and that price declines have been narrowing since early spring.
So, where does all this leave the young man? Today, he has more choice, more negotiating room, and more support than any buyer has had in years, but only he can decide whether the timing suits his life. Our job is not to predict the market for you. It is to give you the clear and honest picture so the decision can be truly yours to make. That is what our sales team does every day.
I don’t know what the market will do next year, and neither does anyone else. But if 70 years in this business has taught our family anything, it is that the buyers who did best were deciding about their lives, not the headlines.