When you're moving from one locale to another, even if you're downgrading from a more expensive neighborhood to a cheaper one, you need to get an idea of how much house your savings will buy you before you go out looking. For instance, how much will your downtown Toronto condos sell for, and how large of a home in Vaughan can you get for that price? The best way to find out average values for your destination city is to consult real estate statistics like the ones from the quarterly Royal LePage House Price Survey. The figures we quote here are accurate to mid 2010.
Because the city of Vaughan is a superficial conjoining of several pre-established communities, it is more difficult to find average values for its real estate than it would be to find values for a contained city like London, Ontario. Real estate reports tend to list these conjoined cities under their original town names, so when you're looking for statistics on Vaughan, keep your eyes peeled for figures that pertain to Woodbridge, Maple, Thornhiill, Concord, and Kleinburg. Woodbridge and Thornhill, because they're the largest, will appear most often.
Figures for Woodbridge represent a fairly accurate average for the whole of Vaughan, because Woodbridge is primarily a quiet suburban community like most of the other towns where people who advertise Burlington, Ontario homes for sale live while working in the city. A small three bedroom bungalow in Woodbridge will cost you in the neighborhood of $427,000, while a larger two storey home would cost closer to $475,000. A townhouse retails for about $297,000, and a condo goes for around $275,000.
Thornhill, meanwhile, is more representative of the upper bracket of real estate pricing, because like Leaside real estate, many of its neighborhoods contain larger, more upscale homes. In Thornhill, that small bungalow would cost $620,000. Two storey homes are slightly cheaper at $615,000 and a town house runs at around $260,000. A large home averages at $685,000 and condos are in the $280,000 to $325,000 range on average.
If you're thinking the recession will allow you to snap up a property at a discount, think again. Values for the GTA bounced back extremely quickly for the crisis and are now rising steadily, so if you're going to sell your Port Credit homes you had better do it quick before prices rise further. However, that said, the growth rate is not as high as the city if Toronto. The values for Woodbridge and Thornhill are climbing slowly but steadily, at a rate of one or two thousand per quarter.
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