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If you're in the market for a new detached house in the City of Toronto area, there are two things on which you can count.
First, $750,000 is not a lot of money and will likely get your foot in the door…and only just.
Second, you will not have the same array of location and design choices as you would if you were shopping around for a condominium suite or a townhouse. In fact, detached and semi-detached construction amounted to just 0.5 per cent of the total number of starts in the City of Toronto in April, 2008, according to data supplied by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. A total of 84 detached and semi-detached houses started construction in April in Toronto proper, the last month with available data, while almost 1,400 condo suites got under way.
A combination of a shortage of available land for low-density housing and an enormous, sustained demand for affordable condominium suites has pushed the new detached subdivision out to the 905 region — no surprise there.
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The exception, as we found last week, is in eastern Scarborough, with substantial infill opportunities provided by derelict strip malls and hydro corridors. On the affordability side, Scarborough has managed to keep the average detached new home price under $500,000, with a lot of activity around its underappreciated lakeshore stretch.
In the City of Toronto, it's not derelict stretches but affluent neighbourhoods that are seeing some construction of new detached homes.
It's hard to find a more prestigious address than Rosedale, where The Conservatory Group's Governor's Bridge Estates development has been under construction since 2001. Now entering its final stages, there are eight stately and epic manors still for sale out of a total of 60 originally built overlooking Bayview Avenue and the Moore Park ravine.
The development features an excellent view of the Don River Valley toward downtown from its prominent perch. The elegant facades closely resemble the existing Rosedale mansions, with stone and brick exteriors meshing into classical architectural showpieces.
Prices here range from $1,563,000 to $2,287,000 for between 3,409 and 5,426 square feet of living space with 40-foot-wide frontage. While that is pricey proposition, it is not out of whack with what you might pay for an existing Rosedale house of similar size.
The advantage with the new house is that they're not over 100 years old, like the resale properties, with all the repair bills and inconvenience that might come with it.
Prices come down significantly on the fringes of the city. One of the only large-scale detached, semi- and townhouse developments launched within Toronto's original borders is Westown, by H&R Developments, located just south of Sheppard Avenue near Weston Road on the site of an old government-office complex.
Westown was launched in late 2006 with 26 detached lots for sale; 11 still remain, ranging in price from $515,000 to $587,000 for between 2,246 and 2,980 square feet of living space.
The detached houses here are compact in design, with double garages occupying the ground floor and two- or three-storeys of living space on top with up to four bedrooms. There are also 17 semi-detached and 44 freehold townhouse lots still for sale as well.
Next week we'll be looking at how traditional low-rise houses are squeezing into the Etobicoke and North York neighbourhoods.
