Luxury Home Builders on the March

Lots of new "low-end" luxury homes--C$1.5--C$2 million--are languishing in the Toronto marketplace. (I know; I have one. And I've been building them for 15 years.) But that's not deterring builders of upper end luxury homes.

For instance, taking a brief bicycle ride down my street, then through the woods and up the hill to Country Lane (south-east of Bayview and York Mills) I came across K.P. Isenberg's four-home subdivision under way on a rezoned parcel of land so new it's not in the Province's major on-line land search service. Isenberg paid a whopping C$7.550 million to the last of a series of numbered companies who have been hanging onto the parcel since at least the 1987 boom. I estimate the mansions now under construction need to fetch close to C$5 million each to make the venture worthwhile. (Environmentalists will be happy to note that the homes are built in a flood plain, which required filling before permission was given to build.)

But that's only a taste of things to come.

Just down the street, Lewis Steinberg, a former vice-president of the long-defunct supermarket chain Steinberg's, last year acquired five adjacent lots for C$29,158,878, for which we presume there are grander plans in mind than four mere mansions. Mid-rise luxury condos perhaps?

No word yet on what ATI Technologies Inc. founder K.Y.Ho, whose security-gated 26,000 s.f. mansion is just down the road, feels about all this pending crowding-in of wannabes on his once secluded estate.