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Toronto Home Prices Jump 22% as Buyers Contend With Tight Supply

Toronto Home Prices Jump 22% as Buyers Contend With Tight Supply

(Bloomberg) -- Toronto home prices rose more than 20 percent for the fifth straight month as buyers contended with a shrinking supply of properties on the market.

The average home price in Canada’s biggest city jumped 22 percent to C$770,745 ($591,697) in January from a year earlier, according to the city’s real estate board, and sales climbed 12 percent to 5,188 deals. The number of active listings was half the year-earlier figure, and the average days on the market fell to 19 from 29.

“As we move through 2017, we expect the demand for ownership housing to remain strong, including demand from first-time buyers,” Larry Cerqua, president of the real estate board, said in a statement. “However, many of these would-be buyers will have problems finding a home that meets their needs in a market with very little inventory.”

The price for an average detached home in downtown Toronto was C$1.34 million, the board said. That approaches the C$1.5 million average price in Vancouver, which once competed with Toronto as the country’s hottest real estate market. Housing in the western city has cooled, with a foreign-investor tax and escalated prices keeping many buyers on the sidelines.

To contact the reporter on this story: Katia Dmitrieva in Toronto at edmitrieva1@bloomberg.net. To contact the editors responsible for this story: Daniel Taub at dtaub@bloomberg.net, Kara Wetzel