The Entire City of Vancouver is Moving to Toronto

Broadcast: Ladies and Gentlemen, we interrupt this regularly scheduled podcast to bring you some Breaking News from our True Condos, Vancouver office. Due to an environmental catastrophe, the entire population of Vancouver is going to be moving to Toronto. More on this after the break.

Speaker 2: Welcome to the True Condos Podcast with Andrew La Fleur. The place to get the truth on the Toronto condo market and condo investing in Toronto.

Andew: Thanks for again for tuning into the True Condos Podcast, one again it’s Andrew La Fleur, your host. I wanted to bring you this Breaking News just coming out of our Vancouver True Condos office, that there’s been an environmental catastrophe in the city of Vancouver. It’s been announced that the entire population of Vancouver is going to be moving to Toronto. That’s right all 630,000 people. Every man, woman, and child in the city of Vancouver. Every single person in the city is going to be moving to Toronto.

Oh, wait what’s this? More news coming in from our London, Ontario office where it’s also been announced an environmental catastrophe has happened, and their entire population is also moving to Toronto. That’s right 383,000 people. Every man, woman, and child in the city of London, Ontario and every man, woman, and child in the city of Vancouver 630,000 there are going to be moving to Toronto. That’s a million people if you’re doing the math. A million people are going to be moving to the city of Toronto.

Now the good news is we’ve heard from the local authorities in Vancouver and in London, that due to the fact that we don’t have housing for a million people from those two cities in Toronto while we welcome with open arms. We don’t have housing for all those people. The authorities in Toronto have requested to the authorities in Vancouver and London that they be phased in, and people move into Toronto in a phased-in manner over the next ten years. So it’s not all happening overnight, but it is going to happen. Every single man, woman, and child from the city of Vancouver and also from the city of London, Ontario, two major cities in Canada are moving to Toronto.

Okay, I think you get the point, well jump back into our regular podcast here.

Welcome to the show, thank you for listening. The idea of course with this obviously tongue and cheek breaking news broadcast. I wanted to bring you on this podcast and do something a little different, is to illustrate the point that Toronto is getting a million people added to the city every ten years. That is like the entire City of Vancouver, which is about 630,000 people, the entire City of London, Ontario, which is about 380,000 people. If you took every single man, woman, and child in those two cities and they all moved out of those cities, the entire city. Imagine that, picture that in your mind. Entire city emptied out, vacated, every single person, something out of a zombie, apocalypse or whatever you want to call it. Those people are moving to the City of Toronto.

That’s exactly what’s happening every ten years currently with population growth in Toronto. So we’re adding approximately 100,000 people a year to the GTA. That’s a million people over the next ten years. That’s probably two and a half, three million people are the projections to be added to the GTA over the next 25 years. 25 years is not that long of a time. 25 years ago, would take you back to around 1992, which is when the current real estate boom that were in Toronto was not even started yet. You could say the market really started taking off around 1995, 1996 until now. That is not that long ago, and recent memory for most people and most people can think back to those days in the early 90s, two and a half million people. Again a lot of people.

The reason for this podcast, why I want to bring this up is just to help you get a visual picture and have a mental picture of what it means to have this kind of population growth in Toronto in the GTA. Why investing in Toronto and investing in the GTA is a good move regardless of what else happens in the economy, in the marketplace and so on. As long as we continue to have population growth like we’re seeing, and there’s no reason to believe that this will not continue, if anything, this accelerate as the federal government has announced increased immigration targets.

Moving forward, more people coming into Canada, that means the more people coming into the GTA. It’s something that Richard Florida talks about, and I’ve talked about in this podcast and on videos, and other things is this notion of Toronto being a superstar city, increasingly attracting global talent and global investment. For example, just in the past week, it’s been leaked out that Google is looking at doing a major investment in Toronto to sort of create an entirely new state of the art tech forward latest internet infrastructure. The details are scarce. We don’t know exactly, but basically, it’s a new technology based neighborhood small city within Toronto. The assumption is going to be in the Portland, so if that happens again, it will be a huge win for the city. It would be a huge investment to make in the city by Google.

We’re going to be hearing more and more headlines like this coming in about Toronto being a superstar city and continuing to attract the best and the brightest from around the world. It’s going to continue this theme, of the rich getting richer, which is Toronto is a “Have city,” is a rich city. It’s at the expense of many of these smaller cities in Canada, and smaller towns in Canada will fall further and further behind. As more and more investment dollars and more and more educated and wealthy and upwardly mobile people come into the City of Toronto and come here as opposed to staying in smaller towns or going to smaller cities. This is going to be a continued trend moving forward.

So again, when you’re looking at investing in real estate, follow the money is a very simple mantra that works very, very well over the long term. If you follow the money, if you look where the money is going, where the investments are going, and you invest there, you’re generally going to do very well.

You look at the number of low-rise houses that are being built in Toronto in the GTA, that number just keeps getting smaller, and smaller every year. We’re pushing further and further up against the green belt. Developers have been saying in the media lately just how it’s becoming more and more difficult to get projects, buildings and homes approved. To get land to build homes. We’re building fewer and fewer houses. We’re building more and more condos, but we’re still facing a dramatic shortfall. We’re dramatically undersupplied in the market, obviously in the low-rise housing market because we’ve seen what has happened with prices there, doubling in the last five years or less and going up 35% in the last 12 months.

Condos are the future. Condos are definitely the future of housing in the GTA. Condos are what the next one million people that are coming into the GTA in the next decade, most of those people will be living in condos. Again this is a great time to invest in condos for that reason. Reality is it would be great to invest in houses, but the reality is most people can’t afford to invest in houses. It’s just makes absolutely no sense and cash flow positive houses, for the most part, are nearly impossible to find.

What else can I tell you on today’s episode? I just wanted to add also, a quick point again at the end here. That the rates of appreciation that we’ve seen, the growth rates of 25, 30, 35%. Again I’ve been preaching this over and over and over again. Hopefully, this point is starting to sink in with you the listener, the condo investor. This kind of thing is not going to continue. This is not a sustainable trend. Bank of Canada has said lately as well. They are concerned about unsustainable growth rates. Of course, these are unsustainable. Anybody who thinks that we’re going to continue to go up by 30% a year is crazy. We are going to see things revert back to normal. We’re starting to see signs of it perhaps now in the market in the past few weeks. We’ll see how this trend plays out over the six to nine months.

The point is for condo investor again, you don’t want to assume that you’re going to purchase something and it’s going to go up by 30% every year, but the market is going to continue to grow, the city is going to continue to grow. Your investment is going to continue to do well. Rental rates are going to continue to increase in the future. If you take the long-term view of Toronto, you’ll understand the growth that is coming down the pipe then you’re going to do very, very well as a long-term investor and a strategic investor in Toronto.

Okay, I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, a little bit different than usual, obviously. Hopefully, I caught your attention. If, you found this useful and if you find the podcast useful and the videos and the articles and my emails. Please share this with someone you know, put it on Twitter, put it on Facebook, email it to someone who can use this information who would find it helpful or interesting.

Thank you very much and until next time, have a great week.

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