Condo vs House:10 Years of Toronto Price Change

In 2015, the average detached home in the GTA was priced around $691,900, while condos averaged roughly $322,700. The spread between the two was approximately $369,200 — about a 73% difference.

That gap made condos the natural first step for buyers who couldn’t yet stretch to a house. Save a down payment, get in the market, build equity — the logic was straightforward.

A buyer who purchased a detached home in 2015 has seen roughly 2.1x appreciation in dollar terms. A condo buyer from the same year is sitting at approximately 2x. The percentages look similar — but the absolute dollar gains tell a very different story.

2017 was the year Toronto real estate entered mainstream conversation — and not in a reassuring way. The average home price surged 31.9% in a single year, jumping from $823,400 in 2016 to $1,086,300 — the first time the GTA average crossed the million-dollar threshold.

I was working with buyers during that period. The energy was a mix of urgency and anxiety. Multiple offers on every listing were routine. Some buyers submitted without even viewing the property. The fear of being priced out permanently was real.

The Ontario government responded in April 2017 with the Non-Resident Speculation Tax (NRST) and tighter mortgage stress tests. The market cooled, but it didn’t reverse. That price level became the new floor.

The lesson: policy can dampen demand temporarily, but it cannot manufacture supply. Structural housing shortages don’t resolve themselves through intervention alone.

On the surface, condos and houses posted similar percentage appreciation over 10 years — roughly 2x each. But percentage comparisons obscure the more important story: the absolute price gap between the two has doubled.

In 2015, a buyer could reasonably plan a path from condo to house. Save for a few years, let the condo appreciate, use that equity to bridge the gap. That gap was $369K — challenging but navigable.

Today, bridging from condo to detached requires crossing a $740,000 spread. That’s not just a bigger number — it represents a fundamentally different financial conversation. Mortgage qualification requirements, carrying costs, and down payment expectations have all shifted upward proportionally.

This is why the condo-to-house upgrade strategy requires more deliberate planning than it did a decade ago. The timing, the equity management, and the financing structure all matter more now.

The condo market has been under sustained pressure. In 2025, GTA condo sales fell 14.7% and the average price dropped 5.1% to $667,235. By 2026, that figure has slid further to approximately $626,650 — an 8.9% year-over-year decline.

The causes are layered: elevated interest rates compressing buyer purchasing power, reduced investor appetite as rental yields tightened, a wave of new condo completions adding short-term supply pressure, and broader economic uncertainty. Together these forces have pushed condo prices back toward levels last seen in 2021.

Detached homes, by contrast, have held up considerably better. The $1.47M average has remained relatively stable, underpinned by constrained supply and consistent move-up demand from established homeowners.