toronto real estate

Here's the tiny space you can buy in Toronto vs. other cities in Canada for the same price

While the average price of a home in Canada has now reached just over $637,000, Toronto is, of course, far more expensive than that, consistently neck-and-neck with Vancouver for the title of the priciest place in the country to buy.

While there are still properties in Toronto available around the national average, the pickings are relatively slim — there's been a huge decrease in listings as the market has slowed in recent months — and the spaces that are available are nowhere near as nice as what that price would get you elsewhere in Canada.

One new report really puts this into perspective, looking at the size of a space you can get in municipalities nationwide at a specific price point.

Based on the data from real estate listing site Point2, it is pretty frustrating as a GTA resident to see the tiny space you would get here for $300k, which is about half the price of the national average, and still enough to buy you a ton of space somewhere else.

According to the firm, you could get 247 square feet in Toronto based on the average cost per square foot in the city — a size of condo that hardly exists aside from the rare find, and is way smaller than the national average for a bachelor unit.

This number is topped only by Vancouver, where you could afford just 243 square feet of living space, and puts Toronto at about a whopping $1,215 per square foot. 

Meanwhile, you could purchase a home of a whopping 1,685 square feet for the same price if you're willing to move to Saguenay or Trois-Rivieres, Quebec; after that is 1,579 square feet in St. John's, Newfoundland, 1,493 square feet in Sherbrooke, Quebec and 1,382 square feet in Quebec City.

You can also buy a place that is well over 1,00 square feet for $300,000 in Regina, Gatineau, Edmonton, Saskatoon and Winnipeg based on the prices per square foot of homes there.

On the flip side, the priciest places are the aforementioned Vancouver and Toronto, followed by Montreal (where $300k can buy you 262 square feet), Richmond (355 square feet), Burnaby (347 square feet), then a list of GTA cities: Oakville (383), Mississauga (395), Markham (403), Burlington (404) and Richmond Hill (412).

When considering the home prices nationwide, these numbers mean that you will only get about 525 square feet, which is the size of a studio or small one-bedroom condo, for that $673,000 average price tag in Canada.

And if you want to shell out the price of the average home in Toronto specifically— now $1,086,762 — you would potentially be getting only around 895 square feet, which is certainly not the size you would expect.

For those in Toronto looking to move, Quebec is certainly proving to be home to the cheapest municipalities when it comes to housing, and Ontario, at large, is the priciest.

Lead photo by

@aida_dasilva


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