Urbanation’s Latest Warning: Toronto Is Heading Toward Zero New Condo Completions by 2029

Every so often a housing report lands that deserves more than a headline skim. Urbanation’s latest update on the GTA condo market is one of those.

The short version: the Toronto condo market is going through its weakest stretch in roughly 35 years right now, and at the same time it is quietly setting up one of the tightest supply squeezes this city has ever seen.

Both of those things are true at once. That is exactly what makes this moment so confusing for buyers and owners.

Let’s walk through it in plain English.

What Did Urbanation Actually Say?

Urbanation president Shaun Hildebrand put it about as bluntly as a housing analyst ever does:

“By the end of the decade, we know with certainty that there won’t be any new condo completions.”

And then the line that should really get your attention: “What we don’t know is how far into the 2030s the supply crunch will last.”

That is not a forecast about sentiment or interest rates. It is arithmetic. Condos take four to six years to build. If almost nothing starts construction today, almost nothing finishes four to six years from now.

The Numbers Behind the Supply Cliff

Here is the completion pipeline for new GTA condos, according to Urbanation:

2025: roughly 29,300 units completed
2026: roughly 22,000 units expected
2027: roughly 14,400 units expected
2029: virtually zero

Now look at the other end of the pipe. New condo construction starts in 2025 came in at about 3,272 units, a 63% drop. Total inventory under construction across the region has fallen to roughly 50,500 units, a 10-year low.

For context, the GTA has historically needed somewhere in the range of 25,000 to 30,000 new units a year just to keep pace with population growth.

We started about 3,000.

That gap is the whole story.

So Why Is the Condo Market So Soft Right Now?

Because today’s market and tomorrow’s pipeline are two completely different problems.

Right now there is a pile of finished product and not enough buyers for it. Urbanation reported completed unsold condo inventory at a record high of roughly 4,295 units in the first quarter of 2026, roughly double where it sat a year earlier.

New condo sales have effectively gone quiet. 2025 saw about 1,599 new condo sales across the entire GTA, down roughly 60% from the year before and down about 95% from 2021 levels. In the first quarter of 2026 there were zero new project launches for the first time in more than 30 years.

Read that again. Zero launches, in a region of seven million people.

The Price Inversion Nobody Expected

Here is the detail I find most telling, and the one that explains why pre-construction has stalled completely.

New condo launches have been priced around $1,123 per square foot. Comparable resale condos have been trading closer to $856 per square foot, and in some completed buildings lower still.

When a brand-new unit costs roughly 30% more per square foot than an equivalent resale unit down the street, buyers do the obvious thing. They buy the resale unit.

Developers cannot simply drop prices to match, because land, labour, development charges and financing were all locked in years ago. So instead of cutting, they wait. And while they wait, nothing starts. And if nothing starts, nothing completes in 2029.

That is the mechanism. It is not mysterious, and it is not easily reversed.

What the September 2026 TRREB Numbers Add

The resale side of the market tells a consistent story.

In September 2026, GTA REALTORS® reported 5,040 sales, down 9% year-over-year. The average selling price was $1,006,409, down 5.1%.

Condos took the hardest hit of any housing type. The average GTA condo apartment sold for $605,257, down 7.7% year-over-year, a steeper decline than detached (down 5.1%), townhouses (down 4.6%) or semi-detached (down 0.2%).

Hildebrand’s read on where that leaves pricing: “Prices are probably getting toward a floor.”

“Toward a floor” is not the same as “going back up next month.” But it is a meaningfully different sentence than anything we were hearing in 2025.

What This Means If You Own a Condo

If you own and you do not have to sell, you are not the one under real pressure here. The pressure sits with the people holding completed unsold inventory and the developers carrying land.

If you do need to sell, pricing has to be honest from day one. Buyers have more data than they have ever had and far more choice. A condo priced to “test the market” in this environment does not get a price discovery process. It gets ignored.

If you are thinking about holding and renting instead, run the numbers with today’s rents rather than 2021 rents. Purpose-built rental starts have been one of the few bright spots, up about 24% in 2025 to roughly 8,545 units, and that new supply competes directly with you.

What This Means If You Are Buying

This is the most negotiating leverage condo buyers have had in a very long time, and it is unlikely to survive the whole supply cliff.

A buyer today gets choice, time, conditions, and a seller who will actually have a conversation about price. A buyer in 2029, looking at a year with essentially no new completions, may get none of those things.

That is not a reason to buy something you do not love or cannot comfortably carry. It is a reason to take the search seriously now rather than waiting for a signal that will only ever be obvious in hindsight.

What About the East End?

This is where I would gently push back on reading GTA-wide condo numbers as your own personal forecast.

East Toronto — Leslieville, Riverdale, the Beaches, the Danforth, Birch Cliff — is not primarily a glass-tower condo market. It is low-rise and mid-rise: semis, detached homes, townhouses, small-building conversions. Those 4,295 unsold units in the Urbanation report are overwhelmingly not in our neighbourhoods.

What the condo story does affect out here is the entry point. When downtown condos get cheap, some would-be east end first-time buyers shop downtown instead. And when the supply cliff eventually bites, that same buyer pool comes back looking for low-rise.

Different pipeline, different timeline, same city.

Common Questions About the Toronto Condo Supply Cliff

Will Toronto really have zero new condo completions in 2029?
Urbanation’s position is that by the end of the decade there will be virtually no new condo completions, because construction starts collapsed to roughly 3,272 units in 2025 and condos take four to six years to build. The completions already in the pipeline simply run out.

Have Toronto condo prices hit bottom?
Urbanation president Shaun Hildebrand has said prices are “probably getting toward a floor.” The September 2026 average GTA condo price was $605,257, down 7.7% year-over-year. Nobody identifies a bottom in real time, but the rate of decline has slowed.

Why are new condos more expensive than resale condos in Toronto?
New launches have averaged roughly $1,123 per square foot while comparable resale units trade near $856 per square foot. Developers locked in land, construction and financing costs years ago and cannot easily reprice, so buyers choose resale instead.

When will the Toronto condo market recover?
Most analysts, including Urbanation, expect a slow recovery beginning around 2027 rather than a sharp rebound. Hildebrand has said that with market confidence still fragile, “the recovery process is likely to begin slowly.”

Does the condo supply shortage affect east end Toronto houses?
Indirectly. East Toronto is mostly low-rise housing, so the condo oversupply does not sit in these neighbourhoods. But condo pricing influences where first-time buyers shop, which affects demand for east end entry-level semis and townhouses.

Final Thoughts

The Toronto condo market is simultaneously the weakest it has been in about 35 years and on track for a genuine supply shortage within four years. Those are not contradictory statements. They are the same story at two different points on the timeline.

Most people will read one half of it and act on the wrong one.

If you are trying to work out which half applies to you — a condo you already own, a first purchase you are weighing, or a move up here in the east end — let’s talk strategy. The answer genuinely depends on your timeline, and the numbers above point in two different directions depending on where you sit.