Brampton house sold at 'huge loss' 2 years after it was bought

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A Brampton house that just sold at a $640,000 loss – after it was listed a handful of times – speaks to the state of the market in the outskirts of Toronto, real estate experts say.

The detached two-storey house, located at 27 Jacksonville Drive, sold for $1.7 million on Jan. 5.

The house sold for $2.3 million two years earlier in January 2022.

At the time, prices were “completely out of control” and in many cases “highly artificial,” Toronto real estate agent Desmond Brown said, describing the super low rates available in the first years of the pandemic.

“We always knew that when prices were going crazy during COVID and post COVID that the outlying area of Toronto would suffer the most when things settled down or when there was a turnaround,” Brown said.

While the Jacksonville property sold at a major loss, Brown said the drop wasn’t as steep as the overall market in Brampton.

The average price of a detached home in Brampton dropped 30 per cent between January 2022 and December 2023, Brown said. By comparison, the Jacksonville house decreased in value by 25 per cent in the same time period.

“In Brampton, they actually did better than what was expected, even though it was a huge loss,” Brown said.

Murtaza Haider, Director of Research at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Urban Analytics Institute, pointed to another house that tells a similar story.

A detached home, located at 1099 Caldwell Avenue in Mississauga, sold for a $800,000 loss last month after selling for $400,000 over asking at $2.6 million in the spring of 2021.

A year later, in March 2022, it was listed for the first of a dozen times at $3.4 million. Over time, the price was reduced until it sold for $1.8 million in December.

“I compared the average price in 2022 to the average in 2023 and I see that Brampton is no different from Mississauga,” Haider said, referring to the decline in prices that began to tumble down as early as May/ June 2022.

“Real estate is a long game, so if people are going to be selling just two years later, they are going to be losing money,” Brown said

The average price of a home across all property types in the Greater Toronto Area peaked at $1,334,062 in February 2022, prior to the Bank of Canada’s first interest rate hike.

Average prices eventually dropped to a low of $1,037,542 before rebounding in the spring amid temporary declines in fixed-mortgage rates.

According to the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board, the average home price at the end of the year was $1,084,692.