After a rocky few years of declining home prices and sales amidst goverment cooling measures, Toronto's real estate market heated up with a vengeance over the latter half of 2019.

The Toronto Real Estate Board's most recent figures put the average price for a home in the city at a whopping $910,419 as of November 30 (that's for both houses and condos). Last year at the same time, the average Toronto home price was $840,391.

That's a sharp increase for just one year, and experts say the incline will only get steeper as we move into a new decade.

In its freshly-released 2020 Housing Market Predictions report, the Toronto-based real estate brokerage Zoocasa declares that next year will see Canada's housing market continue to recover from its "2016-2018 boom-bust cycle."

This much was already apparent, but it remains to be seen just how much the market can re-heat after a brisk few years.

"It's no secret that market conditions in Canada's largest cities have been largely defined by a growing supply and demand gap," explains Zoocasa's managing editor, Penelope Graham.

"While factors such as foreign and domestic investment have also contributed to too-hot-to-handle price growth, that there have been too few homes to satiate demand, particularly in the GTA markets, set the stage for bidding wars and a stratospheric rise in home values over the course of 2016."

Such government measures as the foreign buyers' tax and tighter mortgage restrictions slowed demand significantly after 2016, but only for a little while.

Sales and prices are now rebounding, nearly reaching the kinds of numbers that inspired Ontario's Fair Housing Plan in the first place.

This time around, the spike is being attributed to a lack of supply.

"Increased competition between buyers has resulted in an acceleration in price growth," said TREB's chief market analyst, Jason Mercer, earlier this month. "Expect the rate of price growth to increase further if we see no relief on the listings supply front."

Zoocasa points out that the total months inventory (the length of time it would take to completely sell off all available homes for sale) just hit its lowest level since 2007 at 4.7 months.

Fortunately for those who do aim to buy over the next year, Zoocasa says that mortgage rates are expected to remain cheap.

With the average Toronto home now costing triple what the average millennial can afford, it likely doesn't matter much anyway.