Raise your hand if you knew that Collective Soul was a Christian rock band?
For the record: my hand remains at my side.
Do you remember when you first heard this album in 1995?
Collective Soul’s second album, appropriately named “Collective Soul,” gave us a ridiculous number of hits:
“Gel”
“December”
“Where The River Flows”
“The World I Know”
Each of them were absolute bangers in their own right, and we all have our favourite.
“The Blue Album,” as it’s known, was a much fought-over CD in the Fleming household in 1995 and 1996, and before we knew how to “copy” a CD, we were forced to share. Technically, my brother got the album for Christmas, so it was his, but it spent a lot of time in my SONY CD/Cassette stereo.
Many years later, my brother told us that he had a serious girlfriend in Waterloo and that he would bring her to Toronto on the weekend to meet my sister and I.
She was lovely! And they got married, had two kids, bla bla, bla, but that’s not the point of the story.
The point is that while we were touring the house, she did a double-take at “The Blue Album,” which was sitting on a shelf and had probably been there for a half-decade.
The way she looked at it was somewhat odd. She furrowed her brow, and then looked up at my brother and I.
She was raised in a somewhat religious community, although as most people can attest to, they were “more religious” when they were children than they are now. But her community was Christian, and she knew that my brother and I were, well, this very odd combination who had a Jewish mother and a Catholic father, but who had absolutely zero exposure to religion growing up and were both atheists, or “heathens” as our father called us.
But she couldn’t help herself.
She picked up The Blue Album and tapped it in her hand, looking at us.
I’ll never forget the look on her face as she slowly sort of asked us, “Sooo……you guys are into Christian Rock?”
Huh?
Come again?
My brother and I looked at each other and then chuckled.
“What?” I asked, with a smile.
She said, “Collective Soul. They were literally the Christian Rock band of the 90’s.”
Our jaws dropped. My brother and I had absolutely no idea.
She looked at us and said, “Wow, you guys are really clueless eh? Have you ever listened to the lyrics?”
Umm…..maybe?
She told us, “This was one of the few CD’s we were allowed to have in my house, growing up. My dad was a huge fan.”
I started to think about all the times I sang, “Heaven let your light shine down” while doing my homework in high school, and suddenly I felt quite silly.
I had absolutely no idea what this band actually was back when I was a teenager and the experience of learning the band’s background, while meeting my brother’s girlfriend for the very first time, is one I’ll never forget.
My favourite song is “The World I Know” and my favourite lyrics are these:
So I walk up on highAnd I step to the edgeTo see my world belowAnd I laugh at myselfWhile the tears roll down‘Cause it’s the world I have knownOh, it’s the world I have known
Does anybody else feel that way today?
Or maybe yesterday. Or Tuesday, specifically.
The world is changing dramatically before our eyes and nobody is unaffected.
“The world I have known” is no longer. And I’m not referring to the lyric in the song by Collective Soul.
Regardless of your political beliefs, who you like, who you don’t, and what “side” you’re on, we can all agree that we’re entering a new frontier and one that is evolving daily.
I think back to March of 2020 when “the world was changing” and while it was an experience that none of us had been through before, after the initial shock, we all learned how to move forward.
I don’t want to talk today about Trump, tariffs, Canadian politics, the geopolitical landscape, and the economy, but I will say that much like with the pandemic in 2020, we’ll eventually adopt this as our new normal and learn how to move forward.
There are a lot of folks cheering on the sidelines of this one, especially as it pertains to the Toronto real estate market.
Toronto real estate has become a sport over the last two decades, and just like with sports, there are winners and losers, and fans who cheer for one side or the other.
There are those that want to see the real estate market retract and will predict the same doom and gloom that they’ve been clinging to for a year, or five, or ten, or twenty, and there are those that will say, “Everything is okay here, nothing to worry about,” in hopes that their words will find the real estate Gods’ ears.
Suffice it to say, the start to 2025’s real estate market has been dramatically impacted by Trump, tariffs, and everything that comes with it.
February was a month of uncertainty, even more so than January, and while people still have to buy and sell real estate, the market’s participants grew fewer.
Let’s take a look at the February TRREB stats and as always, I will leave my punches unpulled…
The GTA average home price increased by 4.2% on a month-over-month basis, now pulling closer to $1,100,000:
On a year-over-year basis, however, this is down by 2.2%.
While January’s year-over-year was higher, we’ve now reversed that trend.
We would need to see an increase of 3.4% into March to have a 2025 home price that’s higher than 2024, and I would give this less than average chance of happening.
In a traditional, er, non-Trump, market cycle, we would expect to see a higher increase from January to February.
In fact, the average January-to-February increase from 2002 through 2024 is 6.1%. So this past month certainly wasn’t the end of the world, but it was somewhat lacking, especially compared to 2024’s January-to-February increase of 8.0%:
If you really wanted to claim that the sky was falling, we’d have to see a RED figure in that right-hand column, but that ain’t happening.
2023 and 2024 were both years of very low sales volume, as noted throughout both years here on TRB, and as we discussed early into 2025. We saw a slight uptick in sales last year, but one of the big questions coming into 2025 would be about how many people transact this year.
We saw a 4.9% increase in sales from January to February:
But as you can see from the above chart, this figure looks like an outlier!
No, it’s not a red figure, but it’s a single-digit increase whereas every other increase is double-digit and then some!
In fact, the average increase in sales from January-to-February, from 2002 through 2024, is a whopping 44.3%.
This 4.9% increase pales in comparison.
Looking back at January, we saw a year-over-year decline of 7.9%.
In February, we saw a year-over-year decline of 27.4%
Any guesses as to where this places February of 2025, historically?
Well, it looks like this:
While January’s sales data placed the month third-lowest in any January post-2000, February’s sales data dropped it to last-place.
Interestingly enough, it wasn’t only buyers who tightly hugged the sidelines last month. It was sellers too.
When was the last time we saw a decline in new listings from January to February?
2009.
In fact, we saw this happen in 2007, 2008, and 2009, but not since.
That changed last month:
If I could be optimistic for only just a moment, let me say this:
If we were truly in a bear market, we would be flooded with new listings. But last month, we saw fewer new listings than in January.
New listings were down by 2.6% month-over-month and only up by 5.4% year-over-year:
That brings us to the absorption rate which did increase from January, where it hit a paltry 31.%.
Last month’s absorption rate was 33.5%; not significantly improved, but let’s not forget that we saw a rock-bottom absorption rate of 27.6% in September before “all this stuff” started.
Graphically, there is good news!
Yes, we finally get to use the colour purple…
I mean, yes, it’s more of a shade of purple, but I digress…
We’re a far cry from the 72.5% absorption rate that we saw in a maddening February of 2021!
If we want to break this down further and see what the absorption rate is by TRREB District, it would look like this:
This is sorted by SNLR, but I’ve included the month-over-month change as well.
We’ll monitor this going forward and see if we find any trends or if the data is simply varied every month.
But I also want to look at the market by property type, once again, to see what’s selling and what isn’t.
As you can all probably predict, the freehold market is outpacing the condo market.
But by how much?
This is surprising:
To see a spread of only 3.7% between detached and condominium is shocking, although I’m not surprised to see semi-detached leading the way.
Keep in mind, “townhouse” combines both freehold and condominium townhouses, including “parcel of tied land” or POTL as we know them.
All told, it was a fascinating month in the Toronto real estate market.
We had multiple offers on four listings, all freehold, and transacted at a low sale price of $499,900 and a high sale price of $5,500,000. How’s that for keeping you on your toes?
What do we expect in March?
I’m thinking of a song lyric…
…I’m thinking of December by Collective Soul.
“Your cup runneth over again.”
Collective Soul. They said it first, right?
