People are scooping up homes at near-record rates in the Greater Toronto Area, last month coming in hot and recording the second-strongest sales figures of any February in history, surpassed only by the record-shattering Feb. 2021.

The Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB) recorded an impressive 9,097 sales in the region last month, not bad for second place.

It's a substantial number of homes sold, and yet, it still marked a 16.8 per cent drop from last year's all-time-high when buyers sprung back to life between waves of the pandemic.

Despite all the sales activity, the number of new listings dropped in February, a supply/demand imbalance once again blamed for ever-increasing home prices in the region. TRREB and other real estate experts have been stressing this point for years now, tight competition between buyers driving double-digit price growth year-over-year for yet another month.

JUST RELEASED! Second Highest February Sales On Record🏠. Access TRREB’s latest #MarketWatch Report for insights on February market stats, statements From TRREB Experts
And More!

FULL REPORT HERE ➡️🔗 https://t.co/CXAZD9BMHZ ⬅️ pic.twitter.com/OCgl3qNDne

— Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (@TheReal_TRREB) March 3, 2022

Regionwide, the average selling price for all home types skyrocketed by 27.7 per cent year-over-year, and it will now cost you an average of $1,334,544 to buy a place to live in Toronto or the surrounding suburbs.

If you want a 416 address, you'll have to cough up an average of $1,210,889, way up from $995,171 in Feb. 2021. And the 905 will cost you even more, homes now averaging at $1,402,948 up from $1,070,710 in Feb. 2021.

But the most alarming number is the new average price of a detached home in Toronto, which has officially crossed the two-million mark with a Feb. 2021 average of $2,073,989.

That's a 23 per cent leap over last year's February average.

Prices are projected to keep on growing, though not necessarily to such extremes, with TRREB Chief Market Analyst Jason Mercer suggesting the market can expect "a more moderate pace of price growth in the second half of 2022 as higher borrowing costs result in some households putting their home purchase on hold temporarily as they resituate themselves in the market."

TRREB CEO John DiMichele suggests that these conditions will be a hot-button issue in the upcoming Ontario provincial election, saying, "we know that housing affordability will be top of mind."

DiMichele stresses that "parties and individuals vying for political office must concentrate on bold and creative policies that will support increased and diverse housing supply to account for the current deficit and future population growth as immigration accelerates."