Charles Stuart has a keen understanding of why Toronto’s condo market has been shifting away from smaller units in favour of bigger two-bedroom suites.
“It’s all demographics,” MarketVision Real Estate Corp’s land sales vice-president tells Epoch Times in an interview at the brokerage’s Rosedale headquarters. “With boomers downsizing into condos, there’s a real demand for larger product now.”
Stuart would know. He’s a boomer himself, and one who’s currently in the market for a condo. “I’m pushing 60 and I frigging hate my house,” he says. “Pride of ownership, gardening, maintenance—all those are things of youth.”
It’s not just boomers who want bigger spaces, notes MarketVision’s vice-president of sales ManLing Lau. “I know so many young families living in condos who’ve been trying to buy a house for the longest time, and they just can’t find one—the right one or the right price.
“Too many bidding wars,” she adds. “At a certain point you kind of give up.” (And, like boomers, some younger folks don’t want to bother with house maintenance, either, she points out.)
Two-bedroom suites sold the fastest at the biggest project on MarketVision’s current slate, 88 North, the first phase of 88 Queen, a master-planned mixed-use community by St. Thomas Developments on a full-block site bound by Shuter, Queen, Mutual, and Dalhousie streets. The 26-storey tower launched in January, and most of its nearly 400 units—from 377 to 887 square feet—have been sold.
