Toronto detached home prices cool off more than they have in 2 years

What’s that sound? It’s just a little bit of air letting out of Toronto’s detached home market.

It’s not an explosion, and it’s not exactly a pop either. But it’s more than has been released at any time in the past two years.

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So say housing statistics released by the Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB) earlier this month.

They show that the average price of a detached home was $1,016,145 in December 2016, down from $1,058,273 in the previous month.

That represents a decline of 3.98 per cent, the steepest in the past two years.

It’s been normal for detached home prices to decline from November to December in recent years. But this drop was steeper.

The average price of a detached home fell by 1.57 per cent in those months in 2014, and by 0.45 per cent between November and December the following year.

The next steepest monthly drop in the past two years was in July 2015, when they fell by 3.55 per cent.

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A chart by real estate website Better Dwelling shows that average detached homes saw some of their weakest growth year-over-year in the Rosedale area, where they only grew by 0.63 per cent, and in the Danforth area, where they grew by 5.58 per cent.

The numbers provided by REB are not seasonally adjusted, so they don’t account for regular drops at particular times of year.

But they also come at a time when Toronto home prices are rocketing upward.

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The chart above, which was released by BMO Capital Markets earlier this month, shows home prices in Toronto and Vancouver trending in opposite directions; Toronto’s going up, Vancouver’s going down, based on the MLS Home Price Index.

Toronto home prices are shown to be growing by 21.1 per cent year-over-year, while in Vancouver they’ve cooled down to growth of only 17.8 per cent.

The trend comes after B.C. imposed a 15 per cent property transfer tax on foreign buyers in August.