From the Toronto Star, March 17:
Condo crash ground zero: Prices in this Toronto suburb have tanked a staggering 57%Pickering condo prices have crashed by 57 per cent since February 2022. Vaughan, Markham and Milton have also seen worse losses than the city of Toronto.
Dina Thakkar envisioned one day gazing out at Lake Ontario from the window of her two-bedroom, 700-square-foot Pickering condo.
So, she paid extra for the view.
Unfortunately, she never got to enjoy it.
“It’s almost a nightmare,” she said. She and her husband have been trying to sell since last fall, calling their realtor constantly for updates.
“We are very much stressed.”
The entire GTA real estate sector has struggled over the last four years, after prices reached dizzying heights during the pandemic peak in February 2022.
While Toronto’s cratering condo market gets a lot of the attention, condos in the 905 have seen some of the biggest losses, with benchmark prices dropping over 30 per cent in several communities including Markham (40 per cent), Milton (36 per cent), and Vaughan (37 per cent), over the last four years, according to numbers from the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB). That’s compared to 28 per cent for condos within the city of Toronto.
If anywhere is ground zero, it might be Pickering, the Durham city of just under 100,000 people that’s home to waterfront trails and a nuclear power plant. The benchmark price of a condo there has dropped a staggering 57 per cent from February 2022 to February 2026.
The huge decline does make these homes more affordable for buyers. The catch is many of them are very small. They were aimed at investors, who have deserted the space, and demand has plummeted. That means developers are struggling to sell inventory in completed buildings, and have less incentive to break ground on new projects, leaving governments to fall behind on ambitious housing targets.
Owners like Thakkar, who purchased pre-construction units that didn’t exist yet, are caught up in the crash.
Unlike some pre-construction buyers who planned to sell their contract for a profit before their condo was ever completed, Thakkar said she and her husband intended to live in their unit in the Universal City development, a new master-planned community of five condo towers near Highway 401 and the Pickering Go Station.
“The market was like — boom,” recalled the 46-year-old, who immigrated from Gujarat, on the west coast of India, in 2013.
The couple agreed to buy the condo for $587,000 in 2019. It was supposed to be completed a few years later. They put 20 per cent down to seal the deal.
The realtor who sold it told them by the time the unit was built it would be worth close to $1 million, Thakkar said.
Indeed, in February 2022 the benchmark price for a condo in Pickering was over $1.1 million, per TRREB, with 2,359 new condos sold in the GTA that January, according to the Building Industry and Land Development Association (BILD)....
....MUCH MORE
If interested see also:
February 17 - "Canadian Housing Market Faces Years-Long Price Decline, BMO Economist Warns"Again we ask: Where did all the drug money go?*
*Previously:
August 2025 - Canadian Condo Crash
I wonder where all the drug money went? Canada used to be swimming in the stuff, from the B.C. bud crowd in Vancouver to the Fentanyl cowboys across the plains to Toronto to the old skool Mafias in Ottawa and Montreal. See for example "The Montreal Mafia Murders: Blood, Gore, Cannolis, and Hockey Bags" or at Sky News: "Mafia in Canada: How the ’Ndrangheta built a Toronto empire".September 2025 - Meanwhile In Canada: "No One Wants to Buy a Condo"
