Photo by Jim Crocker/Flickr

A Montréal investment firm is betting big on Toronto’s lagging condo market. On May 12, developer and investment firm Jesta Group announced plans to spend half a billion dollars on more than one thousand Toronto condos. The move comes after months of steady decline in the sector. Since January sales in the city have hit a 35-year low, the market has been sitting on record levels of unsold inventory, there have been zero new projects launched, and prices across the GTHA have undergone a sustained period of deflation.

After almost six months of retreat, Jesta believes the condo market has hit bottom and is poised for a rebound. In the words of Anthony O’Brien, a senior director at the firm: “the current market environment has created a unique window to deploy capital at scale.”

Jesta, which manages a large portfolio of residential, office, and hospitality assets, is effectively buying distressed inventory during the contractionary phase of a speculative bubble. It is a scaled down version of the buying spree embarked on by institutional investors like Blackstone when the bottom fell out of the American housing market in 2008. This is yet another case of big money buying from overleveraged retail.

The gamble is that today’s oversupply will become tomorrow’s shortage. Given that just a few months of stalling prices have brought condo construction to a screeching halt—and all but ensured that virtually no new units will come online three years from now—it is a reasonable bet.

If Jesta’s wager pays off it will validate projections made by economic researchers at RBC who, in the fall of 2025, predicted surplus inventory could start to be sold off this year, a process that “would likely be gradual initially, accelerating later in 2026 as resales gain momentum. Such conditions would set the stage for renewed pre-construction demand in the second half of 2026 with more robust activity in 2027.”

Economists are normally averse to prognostication, but in this case, it’s a no-brainer. Cyclical volatility is a known function of financialized housing systems like ours.

The boom and bust of Toronto’s........

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