Nearly six out of 10 millennials residing in the Greater Toronto Area haven’t yet given up on their ambitions to own a home one day but many believe they will have to relocate in order to do so and some are even willing to seek out remote jobs to make it happen, a new survey suggests.
The Royal LePage survey conducted by Leger reveals that 59 per cent of GTA residents between the ages of 26 and 41, who do not currently own a home, still believe that they will some day.
However, only 22 per cent of those respondents anticipated buying a home in the city where they currently reside.
Another 37 per cent said that they would have to relocate to realize the dream of home ownership while 13 per cent didn’t want to say.
Nationally, only 31 per cent of respondents said that they would have to relocate to afford a home.
The survey also found that a plurality of GTA residents (49 per cent) would change employers in order to be able to work fully remote. Nationally, the percentage of respondents who said that they would change jobs in order to work remotely was lower – about 40 per cent.
“A lot of people I think are caught up, young people, are caught up in the in the whole pandemic relocation wave that we saw for the very first time in the Golden Horseshoe, people leaving for other provinces,” Royal LePage President and CEO Phil Soper told CP24. “Typically we attract people from other provinces but during the pandemic that that trend reversed and I think our millennials, our younger homebuyers, our younger professionals are still thinking along the lines of remote work. (Toronto) Mayor Tory has talked about how some of that is changing but at this stage people are still thinking mobility will solve a lot of my problems.”
Real estate prices have fallen
Real estate prices in the GTA have fallen steadily in recent months amid a sustained campaign by the Bank of Canada to hike interest rates in a bid to battle inflation.
In a report released earlier this month, RBC warned that a housing correction already underway in the GTA could end up being “one of the deepest of the past half a century” with double-digit price declines from peak to trough.
However, it should be noted that the cost of buying a home in the Greater Toronto Area is still limiting for many residents with the average benchmark price in July coming in at $1,074,754.
According to the Royal LePage survey, more than half (56 per cent) of millennials in the GTA already own their home, which is roughly in line with the home ownership rate among that age group Canada-wide (57 per cent).
Of those who plan to purchase a home in the next five years, about 47 per cent said that they would do so in their current city while 45 per cent said that they would relocate.
Interestingly, when cost of living was excluded as a consideration approximately 80 per cent of GTA residents said that they would choose to remain in the region.
That was higher than any other urban centre for which a breakdown was provided.
“It comes back to what you want to do and what's important to you, as a family, as a person and for most Canadians, about seven in 10 Canadian families, own their homes. So it's been a long established way to build stability or security for your family and with millennial our research shows exactly the same mentality," Soper told CP24.
The Leger survey was conducted between June 10 and June 16 using an online panel of 2,003 individuals.
A margin of error was not provided because a non-probability sample (web panel) was used for this survey.
