I'm back with my semi-regular round up of news related to real estate in Toronto. Quite a lot going on this week as the first week of March is traditionally represents the beginning of the spring market and the busiest time of the year for the real estate industry.

Students and homeless people rejoice: the line up for condos at College Park is over and finally everyone can go home and get some sleep. Things were fairly civil although it briefly turned ugly before order was restored as agents got their priority numbers and were allowed to go home.

Rather than continue to lease it out a prime piece of property on Bloor Street for pennies on the dollar, the city decided to sell it for pennies on the dollar. McDonald's bought the property across from the ROM for $3.38 million that is probably worth at least $8 million. McDonald's in turn has plans to sell it the property developer Bazis International-the Kazakhstan-based developer behind the infamous 1 Bloor project. I can picture it now: high-end Yorkville condos with a McDonald's in the building!

Harry Stinson-the one-time condo king of Toronto is going to try his luck in Hamilton of all places with a proposed condo tower above an historic downtown hotel. This is very befitting of the city of Hamilton's current marketing campaign: "If you can't make it there, you can make it it in Hamilton!" 80-storeys of glass and steel in downtown Hamilton, anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

And finally, the numbers are in and the results are somewhat surprising. The Toronto Real Estate Board is reporting that sales in February were down 14% in Toronto versus February of last year. Two possible causes include the introduction of the new land transfer tax, the terrible weather we had in February.

Photo by . Spiral . from the blogTO Flickr pool.

Andrew la Fleur is a registered real estate agent and regular contributor of blogTO.