As Toronto builders advocate for expanding the residential development zones beyond the GTA, a new report shows a record number of land transactions and dollar investments in the industry — suggesting investors are doing more business with less land. According to real estate services firm CBRE Canada, investors shelled out a total of $6.8 billion in residential land transactions across the GTA last year. That amount is more than three times what it was about a decade ago, and represents the highest investment on record.There were also nearly 40 per cent more land deals recorded in 2017 than a decade earlier, with a total of 149 such transactions last year for low-density developments — the land purchased to build single-family and semi-detached houses.Mike Czestochowski, CBRE Canada’s executive vice-president for land services, said the increase in transactions is a result of decades-long changes that have transformed the local housing industry. Investors are now willing to pay more, even for much smaller pieces of land, as they know they can sell condos and houses at high prices, he said.“When I started in this business a long time ago, a developer would not be interested unless it’s 50 or 100 acres of land,” he said. “That same developer, if he’s looking at 10 acres today, let’s say in the city of Markham, he’s very interested because on 10 acres he may be able to fit 150 townhouses. And that’s a big enough project to get enticed with.”CBRE expects the trend to continue in the future. For the first half of 2018, the average price for one acre of low-density land in the GTA was more than $1 million. A decade ago, the same acre cost $382,000. For the high-density land, which is used for condo and rental apartments development, a square-foot of space is averaging $87 this year. It was about $42 a decade ago, according to the CBRE report.Another contributing factor driving the market up is the ...
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