Greetings Folks,
If you have been following along with our weekly updates on How COVID-19 is Impacting the Liberty Village Condo Market, then you have a pretty good idea already of what is going on. Now that the April stats are fully available you let’s take a deep dive and see how April looked in the neighbourhood for condo activity.
If you are interested in looking at the GTA Toronto Real Estate Board stats for April, which covers a much broader market, they are available here.
Sales Volume & Average Sale Prices (don’t mix those up)
If you haven’t heard already, sales volume has been DOWN in Liberty Village. WAY DOWN. 7 sales in the month of April. Compare that to 30 sales in March 2020 (21 in the first half of March) and 33 sales in April 2019. This means we have seen an almost 80% decline is sales volume for the month of April compared with April of 2019.
There are currently 30 condos for sale in Liberty Village. Up slightly from what we saw in early 2020 but certainly not a ton of supply. I see this as a good thing and should help stabilize pricing if the trend continues.
I hesitate to talk pricing because 7 sales is not a whole lot of data to go with to effectively discuss average price changes. It’s also important to note that most of the condos on the market for the months of March and April were people that NEEDED to sell. Our position was that if you don’t HAVE TO sell in an unprecedented global pandemic, WAIT. Some people didn’t or couldn’t and that’s why we saw some sales prices that reflected this.
The Liberty Village condo market had been on an absolute tear for the first 2 and a half months of 2020. In some cases sale prices were up over 7% in just 3 months. April’s sale prices demonstrated that we had come off the peak and returned to Fall 2019 pricing. 
Everyone wants to know where the market is going to end up. Will the market crash or will it continue it’s historic average of 7% per year (as TREB has predicted for 2020) increase. The data that comes out over the next couple of months will be far more telling as people adjust to the new normal.
I will be carefully watching important markers like the Months of Inventory, an important supply/demand measure of how fast all the existing properties on the market would last assuming a) no more listings are added, and b) the rate at which condos sell is a constant figure based on the average of the last 12 months of sales.
At the time of writing we are currently sitting at about 4.5 months of inventory or a balanced market. However, this only reflects a handful of sales and not a big surge in available inventory.
The Rental Market in Liberty Village
We were seeing a steady increase of available listings for rent in Liberty Village by the 3rd quarter of 2019. That has continued and even increased as a result of COVID but this trend was already happening. At the time of writing this, there are currently 76 condos available for rent in Liberty Village. 21 condos were rented out in April 2020. 48 were rented out in April 2019.
Depending on how quickly these available listings get absorbed post-lockdown we should see some downward pressure on rental pricing in the coming months.
Questions about the market? I always welcome your inquiries at [email protected]. Want to see what’s available for sale in Liberty Village? They are here. Available rentals are here.
