Real Estate Update

Toronto Star
The Lakeview lands in Mississauga have officially been sold to developers for $275 million in the latest step toward the transformation of the city's waterfront. The 177-acre site, formerly a provincial coal-fired generating station, will be transformed into a sustainable, mixed-use residential community by Lakeview Community Partners, a consortium that includes Argo Development, TACC Construction, Branthaven Homes, Greenpark Group and CCI Development Group, according to a press release from provincial agency, Ontario Power Generation (OPG). Sixty-seven acres of land will be remediated and transferred to the city of Mississauga as part of the deal.  READ MORE

Mississauga.com
Coun. Nando Iannicca's vision to build Mississauga's own version of "Central Park" in Cooksville is inching closer to reality. The City of Mississauga has purchased three properties in the targeted area, east of Hurontario Street, between Dundas and the Queensway. Acquisition of the properties is the start of a lengthy process that will allow the city to create an additional 25 acres of green space in the densely populated core.  READ MORE

Mortgage Broker News
Housing policies can, and will, affect the economy – TREB The impact of housing policies on sales activity will make itself felt upon the economy, according to the Toronto Real Estate Board Earlier this week, TREB announced the results of its latest study that culled consumer polling data from Ipsos Public Affairs and findings from a recent economic impact analysis completed by Altus Group. The release of the study came in the wake of a successful Toronto Summit and release of TREB's third annual "Market Year in Review & Outlook Report" at the end of January.  READ MORE

Globe and Mail
Toronto's high-rise condo developers are increasingly realizing they can play a role in meeting the needs of buyers looking for "missing middle" housing – and are starting to plan buildings that are no longer dominated by one-bedroom or studio units. In recent decades, city planners have urged developers to set aside only 10 per cent of a building's units for multibedroom uses and it wasn't uncommon to see buildings sprout up in the core consisting almost entirely of studio or one-bedroom units. A 2017 study by Ryerson University and Urbanation Inc. found only 41 per cent of 105,000 condos in the planning-construction pipeline were two-bedrooms or larger.  READ MORE

Urban Toronto
Since December, excavation has been ongoing at the construction site of Wesley Tower at Daniels City Centre, a new 19 and 43-storey, Rafael Bigauskas Architects-designed condominium complex coming to the City Centre Drive and Confederation Parkway intersection to the west of Square One in Mississauga. The two towers will share an underground garage and podium, with the taller tower being built as the first phase, and marketing yet to begin for phase two.  READ MORE

Insauga.com
Home sales via Canadian MLS systems were down 6.5 per cent in February. It marks the second consecutive monthly decline following the record set in December 2017 and the lowest reading in nearly five years. February sales were down from the previous month in almost three-quarters of all local housing markets, with large monthly declines in and around Greater Vancouver (GVA) and Greater Toronto (GTA).  READ MORE

Toronto Star
When Jess and Adam Lee brought their newborn daughter, Olivia — six pounds, seven ounces — home this month from the new Milton District Hospital, they were thrilled with the calibre of care they received in their adopted community. Jess was relieved to find she liked the obstetrician who worked out of the hospital, where 89 babies were born in December and another 79 delivered in January. The number of births has been steadily increasing over the past decade as Milton’s population has grown, according to Halton Healthcare.  READ MORE

Globe and Mail
Sales of properties fetching at least $1-million in the Greater Toronto Area have plunged while the Vancouver housing market girds for a slowdown following last month's B.C. budget. The number of GTA residential properties that sold for $1-million or more in the first two months of this year – mostly detached houses, but also including condos and townhomes – fell to 1,498, down 55 per cent from the same period in 2017, according to Sotheby's International Realty Canada.  READ MORE
 

Forbes
In 2017, venture investors deployed over $5 billion in real estate technology, more than 150 times the $33 million invested in 2010. Once a sector seemingly ignored by the venture industry, real estate tech has come front and center, notably producing two of the three most valuable startups in the United States, WeWork and Airbnb.  READ MORE

Insauga
We all know that Mississauga real estate doesn't come cheap and that affordable homes are, for the most part, few and far between. All that said, it's often interesting — and enlightening — to see how local accommodations stack up against national ones.  READ MORE

REM
Condominiums that in their previous lives were used as warehouses, other types of industrial structures, churches, jails or orphanages have been given a new lease on life in recent years when they were converted into condominiums. In the construction industry they are referred to as residential condominium conversion projects or RCCPs.  READ MORE

Better Dwelling
Toronto real estate finally stops hemorrhaging... kind of. The Teranet — National Bank of Canada (NBC) home price index update shows Toronto prices have stopped declining. Great, the Home Price Index (HPI) declines are over! Not exactly. Toronto's HPI saw an increase due solely to soaring condo prices, while other segments continued to drop.  READ MORE

REM
Real estate agents, like other professional service providers, understand that the recipe for success depends on the three Rs: Reputation, Referrals and Relevance. Your reputation is critical and leads to strong referrals if your service and approach are relevant to what the client needs. But are reputation, referrals and relevance enough?  READ MORE

Insauga
Mississauga's real estate market, heavily tied to Toronto's due to proximity, has been a fascinating one to watch over the past year — and it doesn't look like things are getting any less exciting (or concerning, depending on your perspective and general anxiety level). Although government-initiated policies (the province's Fair Housing Plan and the OSFI stress test) have cooled the market and helped bring it back into balance, a recent Visual Capitalist report indicates that Toronto — and presumably by extension, Mississauga and other GTA cities — is still considered at risk of a housing bubble.  READ MORE

CBC News
Toronto and Vancouver's real estate markets have responded to surging prices and a growing demand for homes with a supply of new housing that is "significantly weaker than other Canadian metropolitan areas." The disparity between supply and demand has been largest in the two cities, but "we do not fully know why this is the case," said the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, in a report it released recently on escalating house prices in the country's large metropolitan centres between 2010 and 2016.  READ MORE

Financial Post
A half a million dollars bought half as much space in Toronto's condominium market as in other Canadian cities in 2017. And in Vancouver, it bought nothing at all, with analysts unable to find any new condominiums at or below the $500,000 mark, according to a study of 2017 sales data by the Altus Group.  READ MORE