THUNDER BAY — Finding a house worth less than $500,000 has become a bigger challenge across the province in the last 10 years, but the change in Northern Ontario communities isn't nearly as significant as in Southern Ontario.
According to new data released Wednesday by the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation, in 2013 seventy-four per cent of residential properties in Ontario had a home value estimate of less than $500,000.
In 2023, that number had dropped to just 19 per cent.
By contrast, while just under 98 per cent of properties in Thunder Bay were valued at less than $500,000 in 2013, 10 years later the figure had only fallen to 83 per cent.
The Thunder Bay Real Estate Board reported recently that the average selling price of a single-family house in the city last year was $320,000.
Among Northern Ontario cities for which MPAC released data, only Sault Ste. Marie had a higher proportion of homes with a value less than half a million dollars last year – 86 per cent, compared with 98 per cent a decade earlier.
In Sudbury, the comparable figures were 95 per cent (2013) and 69 per cent (2023).
Communities with the lowest proportion of residential properties under $500,000 are all in the Greater Toronto Area, where the number ranges between only 0.2 per cent and 2.5 per cent.
In more distant cities such as London, Windsor, and Kingston, the figure falls between 29 per cent and 73 per cent.
MPAC says the median value for homes in Ontario as of December 2023 was $765,000, but in the GTHA it was $1,031,000.
The median value represents the mid-point, meaning half the properties have a value above, and half have a value below.
For detached homes only, the median value in December was $862,000, an increase of 128 per cent since 2013.
