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GTA New-Home Sales Sink to 45-Year Low
Greater Toronto Area new-home sales fell to their lowest level in 45 years in 2025, capping the worst year on record for the region’s housing market, says a new report from BILD.
The group began tracking the region’s new-home sales in 1981.
There were just 240 new home sales in December, down 24% from December 2024 and 82% below the 10-year average, according to data from Altus Group, the official source of market intelligence for BILD. A typical December would see 1,327 sales based on the previous decade’s average.
“GTA new home sales in December 2025 reached an all-time low, bringing a fitting close to 2025,” said Edward Jegg, research manager at Altus. “Never in the 45 years that new home sales data have been collected for the GTA have we seen just 5,300 sales for an entire year,” “Meanwhile, 2026 is likely to see geopolitical concerns linger, prices remain elevated, and the Bank of Canada has indicated the cycle of interest rate cuts has ended – thus, the main drivers of buyer hesitancy are expected to drag on well into the year.”
Condominium apartments — including units in low-, medium- and high-rise buildings and stacked townhouses — accounted for 87 sales in December, down 42% from a year earlier and 91% below the 10-year average.
Single-family home sales, which include detached, linked and semi-detached houses and townhouses excluding stacked townhouses, totalled 153 in December, down 8% year-over-year and 59% below the 10-year average.
For all of 2025, total new home sales reached 5,314 units, with 3,247 single-family homes sold, down 63% from the 10-year average, and 2,067 condominium apartments sold, down 89% from the 10-year average.
Remaining inventory in the GTA edged down slightly month-over-month to 20,849 units in December, including 15,115 condominium apartments and 5,734 single-family homes. Based on average sales over the past 12 months, that represents 26 months of inventory — the highest level recorded to date.
“New home sales are down well into the double digits across the province, putting 100,000 jobs at risk in Ontario alone,” said Justin Sherwood, chief operating officer at BILD. “To find a comparable collapse in new-home construction, you would probably have to look back to the 1940s. New-home construction is a cornerstone of our economy, yet it has effectively stalled. Now is the time to eliminate the HST on all new homes to lower the cost of housing and get buyers back into the market and the industry back to work.”
Sherwood told The Toronto Star that Ottawa’s passing of the first-time homebuyers’ HST exemption ahead of the spring housing market, when sale activity is typically highest, would provide more certainty to the market. He also called on the federal government to move ahead “as quickly as possible” with its $12.2-billion commitment to reduce development charges.
He also told his interviewer that the HST exemption could could allow homebuyers to qualify for mortgages, and development-charge reductions would “structurally lower costs.”
The benchmark price for new condominium apartments in December was $1,021,235, holding at what BILD described as an apparent price floor. The benchmark price for new single-family homes was $1,409,725, down 9% over the past 12 months.
In Simcoe County, there were 21 single-family new home sales in December and no condominium apartment sales. The weighted average price of single-family new homes in the region was $1,150,934.
BILD, which represents more than 1,000 member companies in the homebuilding and land development industry, warned that continued weakness could further affect employment, housing supply and the broader economy in 2026.
The BILD report comes after the Canadian Real Estate Association reported that a sharp drop in Southern Ontario lower GTA home sales contributed to a 16.2% reduction in overall Canadian home sales in January. CREA attributed the decline in Southern Ontario sales primarily to a severe winter storm that struck the region in January, but the BILD report did not cite the bad weather as a contributing cause of the GTA new-home sales decline.
Sherwood noted to the Star that similar home-sale declines, including all product types, are prevalent across Ontario’s Greater Golden Horeshoe and most of the province, along with Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton.
“It’s not a Toronto-only problem,” he told his interviewer.
Photo: Shutterstock
- ◦Sale/Acquisition
- ◦Development
- ◦Policy/Gov't




