Why Toronto’s Housing Market Just Hit a 25-Year Low
The official explanation is tariffs. The real one was signed in a boardroom last October — with a $13 billion price tag.
On Wednesday, the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board opened its books on the year and confirmed the number a lot of people in the city were dreading: 62,433 homes sold across the Greater Toronto Area in 2025. That’s the weakest year for the Toronto housing market since 2000 — back when a house here cost a fraction of today’s down payment.
Sales fell 11% in a single year. The average price dropped almost 5%, and by January it had slipped under a million dollars for the first time since 2021. If you’re carrying a mortgage right now, you can already feel the floor moving.
The board’s own chief economist pointed at tariffs and a trade war as the reason buyers won’t move. He’s not wrong. But the decision that really explains why nobody’s buying — the one made in a boardroom last October, with a number on it big enough to build a city — is the part Ottawa is still calling a “disappointment” instead of what it actually was.
A Housing Market Doesn’t Freeze on Its Own
People stop buying homes when they stop trusting their paycheck. And in Ontario, paychecks have been disappearing for two years straight.
Go back to April of last year. Trump slapped a 25% tariff on every vehicle built outside the United States, and within days Stellantis shut down its Windsor Assembly Plant — the beating heart of Canada’s auto industry — and sent its workers home. Carney answered by matching the tariff 25% the other way and told the country to keep its elbows up. That was the promise: stand firm, and the jobs would hold.
They didn’t.
- Statistics Canada says Canadian manufacturing shed more than 40,000 jobs over the following year — 27,000 of them in Ontario alone.
- By October, Ottawa was giving General Motors 15 days just to explain what it planned to do with its Ontario workers.
- Ontario’s unemployment rate climbed to 7.8%, the highest in nearly four years.
- And for the first time in recorded history, the country’s population actually shrank.
Here’s why this matters for the house you’re trying to sell: Ontario is roughly 40% of Canada’s entire economy. When its factory towns stop hiring, its cities stop buying. National Bank’s economist called 2025 the quietest year for Toronto home sales since 2000 and said the rate cuts weren’t enough to fix it — because the problem was never just interest rates.
The problem was fear.
But the sales number isn’t the scary part. The reason behind it is. Those 40,000 jobs didn’t vanish into thin air. They got an address. And it wasn’t in Ontario.
The Boardroom Decision Ottawa Called a “Disappointment”
On October 14th, Stellantis — the company that owns Jeep, Chrysler, Ram, and Dodge — stood up and announced its plans for the future.
The story Ottawa wanted you to hear was a small one: one model, the Jeep Compass, moving from the Brampton plant down to Illinois. A setback. Something the government was “working on.” That’s how Carney framed it — he had called the CEO, expressed his disappointment, and gotten assurances.
Assurances.
Then the actual filing came out, and it wasn’t one model. It was $13 billion that Stellantis is pouring into the United States — the single largest investment in the company’s 100-year history — to expand American production by 50% and create more than 5,000 new jobs in Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana.
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That’s not a typo. Five thousand American jobs, funded by the largest check the company has ever written, while the Brampton plant sat dark.
The Plant Your Tax Dollars Built
Here’s the part that should make every taxpayer in the country sit up. Brampton wasn’t just any factory. Back in 2022, governments promised $1.4 billion of public money to help retool it and its sister plant in Windsor. Three thousand workers were told to wait. They’ve been idle since the end of 2023.
So what about Brampton’s future? That’s the part Ottawa doesn’t want you to map out. So let’s map it out.
The future went to Belvidere, Illinois. Your tax dollars built the runway. The plane took off for the Midwest.
Pull quote: “Your tax dollars built the runway. The plane took off for the Midwest.”
What $13 Billion Leaving the Country Costs You at Home
Put the two stories side by side. On one side, the Toronto housing market at its deadest point in 25 years. On the other, the country’s flagship automaker shipping $13 billion and 5,000 jobs south while the plant we paid for collects dust. Now look at what that does to you.
Your Community
Brampton is a city of working families whose paychecks just evaporated — 3,000 of them, plus the parts suppliers, the shops, and the restaurants that lived off those wages. Those families aren’t buying homes this year. They’re trying to keep the ones they have.
Your Kitchen Table
The average Greater Toronto home is now worth $973,000. If you bought near the peak, the equity you were counting on — for retirement, for your kids, for a move — has been quietly bleeding out while your mortgage payment didn’t shrink one cent. The bank doesn’t pause your payment when the plant pauses production.
What Comes Next
New home sales in the GTA just hit 269 units in a single month — the lowest since 1981. The builders have stopped building, which means construction jobs are next, which means even fewer buyers the year after.
And one more number barely made headlines, but it tells you how far the damage has spread. Out west, while Ontario hemorrhaged factory jobs, a December poll found nearly one in five Albertans now say they’d vote to leave Canada entirely. Premier Danielle Smith has already set a separation referendum for this October.
One Story, Not Five
Line it all up: the closures, the money that chose Illinois, the equity draining out of your house, an entire province openly asking whether it still wants to be in the country. The picture is a country quietly being hollowed out from the inside — while its government calls the hollowing a disappointment.
The 40,000 lost factory jobs. The $13 billion that chose Illinois over Ontario. The home that’s worth less than it was a year ago. The new-build market at a low it hasn’t touched since 1981. A province drifting toward the exit. None of these are separate stories. They’re one story.
The promise was that if Canada stood firm, matched the tariffs, and kept its elbows up, the jobs and the investment would stay. The record shows the opposite. The jobs left. The money left. And the housing market did exactly what a housing market does when a region loses faith in its own future: it stopped moving.
The trade board’s own economist said it plainly — there’s no recovery until there are real jobs and real trade certainty again.
This isn’t a slump. A slump is weather. This is a country watching its future get loaded onto a truck, driven across the border, and being told to call it a setback.
If this connected dots you hadn’t seen connected before, follow for more reporting on where Canada’s economy is actually headed — and share this with someone who’s trying to sell a house right now. They deserve to know why nobody’s calling.
