The condo market froze. What happens to the towers?

For twenty years the towers went up on a simple machine: sell a floor plan to an investor, use the deposits to get the financing, build, close, repeat. This year the machine stopped.

Urbanation’s count for the first three months of 2026: 246 new condominium sales across the GTA, down 52 per cent on a year earlier and the lowest in 35 years; zero new project launches, for the first time in decades; 4,295 completed units standing unsold, double the year before and nearly five times the level of two years ago, with 8,629 more unsold units still under construction. Since the start of 2024, 32 projects and nearly 7,000 units have been cancelled outright, and twenty more are in receivership or on hold. Developers have cut asking prices on standing units to $1,189 a square foot, 13 per cent off the peak.

What follows is not obvious. Some cancelled projects have become rental buildings. Some sites are simply holes. The federal-provincial development charge cuts were aimed at exactly this, and the early evidence is that cheaper permits do not conjure buyers.

The argument is over whether this is a correction to be endured or a collapse to be stopped and, underneath that, whether the thing that was being built was worth saving.

Sources: Urbanation, cancellations at a record · Urbanation, standing inventory at a record · RBC Economics, the frozen pre-construction market · Toronto Life, developers cut prices