There’s A Lot of Overbidding Happening in Toronto Right Now

By the time he bought a place, in his third bidding war, he had logged 75 properties. I can’t imagine buying now, when prices are 20 per cent higher and the desperation 20 times as thick. The entire city is caught up in the action: one buyer who recently went up against 11 other bidders told me about trying to enjoy dinner with her husband in a restaurant while waiting to find out if their offer had been enough. A waiter overheard their conversation and asked if they were bidding on the same nearby house as another couple in the restaurant. They were. “He told me, ‘They just got it,’ ” she recalled. “I wanted to punch him in the face.”

The housing market in Toronto, Canada is red-hot right now, and has been for a while — even weathering the mortgage crisis in the U.S. This has caused people to whisper about a housing bubble, and write long features about how crazy it is to buy a house up there right now. Maybe one of our many Canadian readers can explain the situation a little better, but Toronto’s housing market sounds very similar to New York’s housing market right now, which is to say: insane.

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