Back to the Grind: living -Working Central in the housing market of Toronto

In Toronto, traffic congestion does more than fraying temperatures. Industry experts say that the increasing congestion weighs on home buyers, raising questions about the liveability of the city and even tightening the work of brokers.

Broker Steve Fudge with Brokerage Bosley Real Estate said that customers now pay much more attention to where they work when deciding where they could buy a house, while it was less careful for commuting. Now calling offices from employees after years of working from home, residential work traffic is a major factor in deciding where a house should buy.

“Where it all depends on is your work,” Fudge said. “That is suddenly a real pivot in terms of where you settle.”

Also of the daily affected broker

Fudge said that longer residential work in the city has cost him business because he is unable to show so many houses as in the past. He was once able to show five characteristics in 90 minutes, he said, while now, because of the traffic, it can take him about three hours.

“It would take me twice as long to show the same properties because of traffic,” Fudge said. “It’s just so annoyed to get over the city.”

He said there was a time when it didn’t matter where the building was, he could probably show it. Now he is careful to do this, because it is too late for a show can easily snowball and destroy the schedule of his entire day.

If he is going to show multiple characteristics, he will try to have them all in one neighborhood, which is a limit for his city -wide practice. The traffic has also hit when Fudge can work, where he is avoided during the rush hour. He thinks that traffic is at the top of the list in terms of obstacles with which realt tower is currently confronted.

The Canadian Center for Economic Analysis showed that the Toronto traffic costs around $ 44.7 billion annually. In December 2024 reportThe organization discovered that almost 40 percent of employees in the real estate sector are affected by congestion, and it ranks as one of the most affected industries. It said that since 2001 there are now about 37 percent more cars on the road in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton area.

Downtown Exodus

Allwyn d’Souza, a senior research analyst at the Real Estate Institute of Canada, told REM that his research found that many home buyers are leaving areas in the city center in large Canadian cities because of traffic and other ways to work towards work.

“As people get older and form families, they don’t want to live closer to cities,” he said. “(They don’t want to) spend time in traffic.”

D’Souza said that even if a family is not in a dense, urban core, they can still drive to the nearest transit station, can park there, then commute to the city, creating a best-of-both-World’s situation. D’Souza said that the trend is clear in Calgary and its suburbs, where the living working time is about the same as people who live in the city.

Quality of life in danger

Jennifer Keesmatic, former capital planner for Toronto and current CEO of CollecDEV-Markee developments, REM said that although traffic can be a headache, the real estate prices are currently higher in the inner cities of cities because they are more connected to transit and running.

However, she said that there may be a turning point where traffic becomes so bad that it starts to influence the quality of life, and that is when house prices could see a dip.

“I think that the quality of life in the region is generally endangered if you cannot reach places without it taking an hour or two hours if it usually takes without traffic,” she said. “The quality of life will start to fall, and there is a connection between house prices and quality of life.”

Keesmaat said that for a developer, where they choose to dig is often based on the variety of available transport methods, not just the level of vehicle traffic. Developers also prefer not to build parking, because she says it is expensive to do this, so they will often prefer locations that are easily walkable, bicycle or almost transit. Yet it is usually popular to be close to large arterial roads, she said, because residents probably still want to drive.

“We discovered that sites that work extremely well for households with two people are locations where there is a large closeness to have both a highway and a highway carried out,” she said, and noticed that any person who lives in one room can choose a different transport mode.

At the same time, Keesmaat said that many home buyers are still all-in in the urban lifestyle, without a car, which means that they are not shocked if there is no parking space. The KeesMathaat company recently announced a development in Toronto that does not offer a vehicle parking for residents.

Fudge said that nowadays raising a family in an apartment is much more an accepted reality, with traffic as a factor. He said there was a stigma for such an idea in North America, while it was more accepted in Europe, but that starts to change.

“The wealth of the city is in principle introduced to the child from birth,” he said.