Foreign Investors Only Own 2.4% of Toronto Condos, CMHC Says.

For the first time, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation has put a number on the percentage of condos across the country owned by foreign investors, and says that number is highest in Toronto — at a mere 2.4%.The federal housing corporation says it came up with the Toronto foreign ownership rates by asking condo corporations and property-management companies for 92,257 GTA rental units which of their owners have mailing addresses outside of Canada.Even as some 14,000 to 15,000 new condos came on stream across the GTA this year — and 29% of them were put up for rent — Toronto’s downtown vacancy rate dropped from a low of 1.6% last year to just 1.1% this year, the survey found.About 34,000 new households a year are created in Toronto through immigration and in-migration from other provinces — something that’s also likely to increase as slumping oil prices impact the Western economy. Of those households, about 11,000 are renters.Incredibly, the lack of enough rental supply to fill demand — even in the face of the biggest condo boom in the region’s history — is playing out across much of the Greater Toronto region, the survey shows. Rental rates have also remained remarkably healthy, although their growth has slowed slightly in the face of increasing supply, CMHC found.