[URBAN NOTE] "A Look at Toronto’s Real Estate Developers"

[rfmcdonald]

Stefan Novakovic's Torontoist article provides readers with a nice overview of the major companies currently engaged in transforming the city.

A decade into Toronto’s unprecedented construction boom, new and transformed neighbourhoods can make parts of our city feel unrecognizable within the span of a few years. With 10 years of rapid high-rise development behind us, low-rise streetscapes and vacant lots continue to give way to modern towers, as seemingly unending glass and steel condos re-make the urban landscape.

While it’s often difficult to tell one concrete skeleton or glass tower apart from another, Toronto’s condo landscape is deceptively diverse. With a large number of companies doing business in the city, understanding the different approaches taken by some of Toronto’s top developers reveals a significant degree of variety in the market.

Though architects, designers, and landscapers all play important roles in shaping the buildings rising throughout the city, it’s real estate developers—subject to the City’s approval process—who ultimately control what gets built where and how.

While no two developments are exactly alike, and large developers employ a range of architecture and design firms, each company nonetheless has a defining and generally recognizable modus operandi. Some developers specialize in specific types of projects—whether mid-rise or high-rise, luxury or affordable—while others tend to cluster buildings together in master-planned communities. The degree to which developers are committed to building cohesive, diverse, and vibrant communities also greatly varies.

In order to better understand the various approaches taken, we profiled some major developers to highlight the variety in Toronto’s market, and how they shape our city.