Quote:
Originally Posted by Stylo
Just visiting Montreal this week and noticed A LOT of apartments either under construction or advertised as going up soon. Many luxury condos/lofts.
Is this a new trend? Is Montreal in a growth phase vs. other cities in Canada? Certainly seemed like more construction than most cities these days. Almost reminded me of the amount of new construction going on in San Francisco these days.
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What you're seeing isn't so much specific to Montreal as Canada generally. Pretty much every city in Canada is building alot of condos right now and has been for some years now, indeed Montreal is almost a laggard in this regard, Toronto and Vancouver in particular are building seriously intense numbers of new strata apartments, and I've read that as regards nation wide new home construction approximately equal numbers of single family detached homes and units in multifamily buildings are being produced. Part of it is that we have expensive RE prices in Canada due to some complicated stuff having to do with not having had the same kind of RE crash you guys had, tons of foreign investors buying low maintenance pied-a-terres in Canadian cities due to it being a relatively safe port in the storm, safe inner cities and schools that allow this sort of development form to become mainstream, a business sector that's familiar and friendly with condo construction financing, and a legislative environment that's friendly to condo construction through a combination of green and anti-sprawl laws as well as looser restrictions on density. All this has conspired for an urban condo boom across the country. Montreal's certainly benefitting, but even with all this construction, it doesn't even qualify as booming all that much out of proportion with the rest of Canada, it's even been a little slow to the party and it's nice to see the boom hitting Montreal now. All this, plus low interest rates that have fed the trend. There's some worry that we're entering or have entered an asset bubble phase as regards RE in recent years due to too many years of sustained low interest rates, so the party may be slowing down, but I also think that this has set the stage for condo development and living to remain more popular into the future despite RE ups and downs, as there's been a cultural shift in consumer attitudes, developer skill sets, and business attitudes regarding this building type. In short,t here's more familiarity with them now and business has cultivated the know how on a much bigger scale as a result of the boom of the last several years.
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