Is Toronto's housing market making a comeback after nearly two years of weak conditions? The industry certainly seems to think so, after new data released Monday showed sales rebounding in April.
On a seasonally adjusted basis, sales jumped 11.3 per cent from March, and were 16.8 per cent higher than the same month a year earlier, the Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB) reported on Monday. But the supply of newly-listed homes on the market hasn't been keeping up, increasing 8 per cent over that time.
"This suggests that market conditions continued to tighten, which points toward an acceleration in price growth," TREB said in a statement.
Watch: How Canada's high house prices are harming the job market. Story continues below.
But the 9,042 sales clocked this April are still 22 per cent fewer than sales in the same period two years ago, when the market was at a peak.
Sales this month were "well below April levels for much of the past decade," TREB chief market analyst Jason Mercer said in a statement. He pointed the blame at the federally-mandated mortgage stress test, but noted that some pressure has been taken off buyers in the form of slightly lower mortgage rates.
Earlier on HuffPost Canada:
The average price of a detached home in Greater Toronto came in at $1.018 million, down 1.3 per cent over the past year. But all of the giveback was in the suburban 905 region, where prices fell 1.7 per cent. Prices were flat in the city of Toronto.
The average price of a detached house in Toronto is down about 15 per cent from its peak above $1.2 million in the spring of 2017.
Condos are another story. The average price of $588,168 this April marks a 5.1-per-cent increase over the past year and an 8.7-per-cent increase over the past two years.
Market experts say the rapid rise in detached home prices in recent years has pushed many buyers into the condo market, pushing prices up even as sales of single-family homes fell.