Can you believe that, it’s incredible… there’s thousands and thousands empty condos in Montréal, a lot are new, and they continue to build them, sometimes even in high rising towers and all. A lot of them are illegal airbnb too.
Why they cannot sell them? They are small, expensive, and sometimes badly placed (no metro, no parking, bad area, place without services around, etc).
13 in 3 months in downtown area!!!
a condo just isn’t worth a million. Bring on the crash!
I have been saying this for at least 15 years: the condo market and the home market shouldn’t be the same market.
I live in Toronto, but this applies to every large already developed city:
There will never be more single family homes in Toronto than there are today AND There will never be fewer condos in Toronto than there are today
So how are those two asset types tied so closely?
I thought it was gonna happen 5-10 years ago, where condos would crash down to 20-40% of the value of a comparable home (which I know is hard as condos are so friggin small) but so far… Nothing? The only reason some condos are cheaper is because you can’t buy a studio house with no backyard or parking…
So how are those two asset types tied so closely?
For 1 bd condos specifically prices did go down, because developers overshot the supply aiming for investors. But larger units are still very much underserved and there’s too much demand.
Houses aren’t expensive just because they’re houses. They’re expensive mostly because there’s a big plot of land underneath, land that eventually will be required for a big tower that will sell like hot cakes. It’s the same market because Canada has a market of land speculation.
I was talking to my fiance about this, I’m about to graduate from my program and both of us can work anywhere there is a hospital. We were looking into houses or condos in the GTA but its just stupid expensive. I joked about bailing on canada entirely and just packing up/moving and that quickly went from a joke to our top option. I can’t believe its gotten so unbelievably to hard to live here, whats the point in staying?
I wasn’t really talking about affordability over all, which won’t get better while governments allow corporations and “mom and pop” to buy and hold hostage the housing supply. But if reality were to actually affect the market, condos would crash hard, which maybe would help a bit with affordability?
But yeah, I wouldn’t live in Toronto either if my industry didn’t pay so well (film and TV production). It’s wack.
Here in Ontario I see new condos going up constantly. I can’t imagine having a mortgage on a condo, plus paying condo fees forever. Who can afford them?
Money laundering CEOs, politicians, cartels, and other unsavory parasites.
Criminals.
plus paying condo fees forever
Isn’t it the norm for a property to generate fees forever? It’s a passive depreciating asset, just like a house
Yeah. My condo fees have replacedy roof and all of the windows in my townhome over the past 3 years. Plus have mowed the lawn, and plowed the driveway.
They’re just smoothing out the cost spikes.
Condo fees in toronto are absolutely insane. More than my whole mortgage in many cases. No pool, no facilitirs, no concierge and yet somehow condo fee still $500+, i dont get it.
My condo fees in montreal are mostly reasonable.
As a condo owner, you should have access to the building’s financial documents. You can look at where all the money is going, and if something is wasteful, bring it up at the co-owners meeting.
Condo fee is just like home maintenance, except you pay monthly and not when the water heater, A/C break, or when you lose siding in a storm etc.
And until that money is needed for repairs, it just sits in a bank account where it’s still technically yours. It’s part of the value of the condo if you decide to sell. It’s basically just a mandatory emergency fund.
Yeah exactly. We bought from previous owner who had prepaid strata for that year, so that was an asset as part of the sale.
For us it also covers yard and tree maintenance, roof repair, plumbing in the walls, salting parking lot and plowing /shoveling in the winter, etc; basically a long list of homeowner costs you would pay somebody to do or use you valued time to remedy. We vote on increasing strata fee to cover other things, owners are in control of it so I don’t see why people have such an issue
I have a condo just outside chicago but downtown the condo fees are so high I could not do one with a mortgage if they were even like 100k instead of like a mil.
It’s not first buyer, because not a lot of people can have a 5k or 6k mortgage + condo fee (can easily be 800-1000 per month in high rises when you have security+pool+gym etc) + property taxes (about 600$/month too in MTL for 1M).
I ask myself this all the time.
This honestly feels like an Onion article. Is it true, though? I can’t find any other sources online that back this claim up. The first search result on Google is this very lemmy post (!)
