Here’s a bit of a surprise: The busiest shopping centre in North America isn’t in New York or L.A., as one might expect. It’s in Toronto — the iconic Eaton Centre.

That’s just one tidbit of information from the Retail Council of Canada’s recent report, which shows Canadian malls are beating their U.S. counterparts on many of the measures that count.

Malls in Vancouver, Edmonton and Montreal also made the list of the busiest malls in the U.S. and Canada.

But the Eaton Centre takes the cake, with 48.9 million visitors in 2015. That’s more visits than were made to the Las Vegas strip or to Disney World and Disneyland combined that year, the report says.

More important to mall owners and retailers is how much money the mall makes per square foot. On this measure, Canadian malls beat U.S. malls by a landslide.

Canadian malls made $744 per square foot in 2015, or $562 in U.S. dollar terms. That compares to US$466 for American malls.

The chart below compares mall sales per square foot in U.S. dollars. The Canadian numbers show a decline because of the loonie’s fall in recent years. But in Canadian dollars, sales are rising.

The report could only speculate on why Canadian malls are doing better.

One reason is that there is less shopping centre space in Canada. There are 23.6 square feet of mall space per person in the U.S., compared to 16.5 square feet per person in Canada.

“The question becomes, why are Canada’s centres more productive? Is it because we have less space and are more efficient, or because we pay more for products than in the United States?” the Retail Council report asks.

Malls for the rich still making a killing

Although Canadian malls make considerably more on average than U.S. ones, the U.S.’s malls for the wealthy and tourist-oriented shopping centres still beat Canadian malls by a long shot.

The U.S.’s highest-earning mall is the Bal Harbour Shops complex in the Miami area, with earnings of US$3,185 per square foot in 2015.

Canada’s highest earning mall, the Yorkdale Centre in Toronto, earned C$1,650.85 the same year.

The City of Toronto wants to buy the 16-hectare (40-acre) Hearn site from Studios of America, which bought it last fall from provincially owned Ontario Power Generation in a controversial $16-million deal.

City council voted 20-2 on Thursday to direct city staff to start discussions with Studios of America, the longtime tenant that bought the hulking former generating plant and sprawling grounds on Lake Ontario in a surprise move.
Councillor Paula Fletcher, whose Ward 14 Toronto-Danforth includes the Port Lands site, said after the vote she hopes Studios of America, which rents out the site for film and video productions and special events, will make a deal.

“If they agree to sell it for what they paid, or what they paid and costs, that would be fantastic,” Fletcher said.

“It is a landmark building on the waterfront, and it really should have been turned over by the provincial government to (tri-government agency) Waterfront Toronto, but, unfortunately, that didn’t happen, so we’ll have to see if the private owners are willing to put these lands into public good.”

She noted that OPG said it had the Unwin Ave. site, east of Cherry Beach, professionally appraised. That means, she said, there should be no argument over the value of the site, which includes a big stretch of waterfront, but also soil polluted from years of coal-fired generation.
OPG included as conditions of sale that Studios of America not be able to resell the site within three years and not put homes or other “sensitive uses” there within 15 years.

Neither Studios of America president Paul Vaughan, nor Mario Cortellucci, a partner in the company and prominent real estate developer, could be reached for comment Thursday after the vote.

The sale was heavily criticized at city hall, where Fletcher and Mayor John Tory said Toronto should have been consulted before the sale of an iconic building and significant patch of the Port Lands, and at Queen’s Park, where the opposition NDP accused the Progressive Conservative government of giving a sweetheart deal to a developer who is a past campaign donor to Premier Doug Ford.

Ford’s government said the decision was OPG’s. An OPG official told councillors, during a 2017 meeting, that his agency would not sell the Hearn site without the provincial government’s “blessing.”
Asked if Toronto will consider trying to expropriate the site if Studios of America doesn’t want to sell, Fletcher said that’s a discussion for April when city staff report back on the result of talks about the sale and on another council direction to consider the site’s heritage value.

Tory believes that Hearn “is an iconic landmark building, and is of significant importance to the city’s waterfront,” his spokesman Don Peat said. “Mayor Tory strongly believes it is in the city’s best interests that the site should be in public hands, so that it can be protected and preserved.”

Also Thursday:

Council voted 15-9 to continue Toronto’s role in a court fight against the Ford government’s unprecedented move to unilaterally cut city council from a planned 47 seats to 25 mid election.
The vote came after council discussed a provincial offer in a closed-door session. Two sources, not authorized to speak publicly, said the offer was simply for Toronto to walk away from its legal challenge and not risk being saddled with the province’s court costs if Toronto loses.

Council voted 21-1 to ask Airbnb to follow the city’s new regulations for short-term rentals, even though the regulations are on hold while Airbnb hosts appeal them to the province’s Local Planning Appeal Tribunal.
The rules would ban landlords from using self-contained basement apartments for short-term rentals, and any property not their primary residence. Councillor Joe Cressy said he wants short-term rental services to follow the rules, so Toronto renters don’t lose long-term homes to the short-term market.

Council voted 21-3 to allow councillors to request a second “Environment Day” in their ward, with activities including distribution of free compost to residents and collection of old electronics and hazardous waste including paint, if they so choose.
Queen’s Park shrinking council meant only 25 Environment Days across Toronto under the old rule of one per ward per year. That would save the city money — each event costs $15,000 — but some councillors said it wasn’t fair to compost-enthusiastic residents in their new supersized wards.

Councillor Stephen Holyday (Ward 3 Etobicoke Centre) drew gasps from his colleague when he proposed eliminating Environment Days altogether, arguing they are all about “councillor self-promotion” and don’t justify costs.

Ottawa should lengthen mortgage amortization periods to 30 years and reconsider the strict stress tests introduced last year, the home building industry says.

The recommendations by the Building Industry and Land Development Association (BILD) comes as it released its annual report Friday showing that new-construction home sales hit a near 20-year low last year in the Toronto region.

It is the second year single-family house sales, including detached, semi-detached and townhouses, have dropped precipitously. The 3,831 sales in 2018 were half the 7,591 of 2017 and 74 per cent below the industry’s 10-year average.

In 2017, sales plunged further — 58 per cent — but that was after the region’s real estate market plunged following the frenzy of 2016 and the first four months of 2017.

The 25,161 new homes — condos and houses — sold last year was the lowest number since Altus Group began tracking sales for the industry in 2000. The last time sales dipped below last year’s levels was 1996, said BILD.

The benchmark price for a new construction house was down 6.7 per cent year over year in December, to $1.14 million from $1.23 million, said the report.

Despite a growing regional population, demand for homes has been weakened by the “artificial influences on the market,” said BILD CEO David Wilkes.

He predicted the industry faces another “tough year” if the stress test isn’t tweaked or eliminated to relieve home buyers of the need to qualify for loans at a rate 2 per cent higher than their lender offers or the Bank of Canada’s five-year benchmark rate.

“We believe (the stress test) has overshot the goals that the federal government had established for it and it is really blocking out new young families from qualifying to purchase their first home,” said Wilkes.

“In many cases they can afford to carry the home but they can’t afford the artificial requirement to finance it that the stress test puts on it,” he said.

“They can’t come up with the downpayment or they can’t qualify for interest rates that we may never see,” he said.

Wilkes also suggested the government could consider lengthening amortization periods to 30 years for Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation-backed loans.

In 2008, Ottawa had extended those amortization periods to 40 years. That policy was gradually rolled back so that by 2012 it allowed only 25-year terms on those insured mortgages.

In 2018, condo sales also fell 38 per cent from 2017 levels, according to the statistics compiled by Altus Group. The price of apartments and stacked townhomes continued to rise, however — increasing 11.2 per cent to a benchmark of $796,815 at the end of 2018 compared to $716,772 the previous year.

The 21,330 sales of condos and stacked townhouses was only 4 per cent lower than the 10-year average.

Wilkes praised Premier Doug Ford’s government for addressing housing supply. But he acknowledged there will be a lag in? supply even after measures to boost new construction, such as changes to the land use policies in the provincial growth plan.

“It takes 10 to 11 years to bring on new developments, whether that’s single-family homes or condos,” he said. “Part of how long long it will take to get that new supply on will be dependent on the changes that are made in order to remove some of the inefficiences, red tape and duplication that are currently in the system.”

Mortgage Professionals Canada’s chief economist Will Dunning said last week that the stress test, which some have suggested reduces buying power by 20 per cent, is “too fierce.”

The province is proposing lowering the population density targets prescribed in the 2017 update to its growth plan to encourage more housing in places such as Durham, Niagara and Halton regions, Barrie, Brantford, Guelph, Orillia, Simcoe, Peterborough and Kawartha. Some areas that were previously targeting development for 80 people or jobs per hectare would need to accomodate half that number under the proposal.

Some environmentalists and urbanists say it is a recipe for more sprawl because builders will put more single-family homes on land that requires residents to commute long distances.

TORONTO — Ontario is considering allowing realtors to tell prospective home buyers the prices of other offers in bidding wars.

The government launched a consultation Thursday looking at the Real Estate and Business Brokers Act, and that’s one rule they’re looking at changing.

Currently, if there are multiple bids on a home, the seller’s broker can only disclose the number of competing offers, but not the details of them.

Through this method in a hot housing market, buyers often can blindly offer more than what they initially planned on spending in hopes of beating their competitor.

The government’s consultation document says disclosing the details of competing offers could give prospective buyers better information to inform their decisions.

Sellers would also know that potential buyers had not been deterred by the prospect of a blind bidding war.

The Ontario Real Estate Association has been pushing for a change to that rule and a broader review of the act, and they say they are thrilled consultations are underway.

Icing isn’t just something that happens in winter storms or hockey games. It’s the term used when internal combustion engine (ICE) cars park in spaces reserved for charging electric vehicles, thus “icing” out their environmentally friendly counterparts.

It can be the source of heated arguments and it’s just one of the challenges facing managers of parking garages as electric vehicles become a growing phenomenon in cities across Canada.

“Charging stations are expensive to install, and as electric cars become more prevalent, there are more people clamouring to be able to plug in while they park. We’re having to set up special zones in garages,” says Bradley Jones, head of retail for real estate giant Oxford Properties Group of Toronto.

Oxford has already installed more than 150 charging stations in garages and lots across its Canadian portfolio of offices, retail, industrial and hotel properties. Most are Level 2 plug-ins that run on 240-volt circuits and require several hours to top up an electric vehicle (EV) battery. They can cost as much as $10,000 each to install. A few are fast-charging Level 3 units whose high-voltage circuits can provide up to 64 kilometres of driving range for every 10 minutes of charging but cost between $50,000 and $70,000 each to install. (Level 1 is a connection to a standard 120-volt household current, which can take up to half a day to fully charge an EV battery.)

Many commercial installations in Canada to date have been financed by government grants, but those programs are winding down and now the challenge is to find ways to make providing chargers cost-effective, Mr. Jones says. There’s been resistance to paying extra to plug in. “The tenants balk at paying for the charging when they are already paying for parking.”

Oxford has launched a pilot program to test different rate structures at two of its properties in Toronto: the RBC WaterPark Place tower at Queen’s Quay near Bay Street and the MetroCentre Wellington Tower west of the financial district.

At WaterPark Place, the electric vehicle charging zone is on the first level alongside the handicap parking bays. There are 20 spaces marked with large logos on the bright green walls, as well as the floor, indicating that they are charging stations for electric cars. The spaces also are defined by their Level 2 plug-in blocks that are about half the size of self-serve gas pumps and lit with a series of blue lights. All this colour coding should make it clear they’re reserved for EVs, but icing is still a problem, says Marlee Kohn, manager at Oxford Properties. “We’re considering changing the wording to make it clear: ‘This space restricted to electric vehicle charging only.’”

Another challenge is making sure EV owners move out of a stall when their car is charged up, so others may plug in. “We don’t want people occupying a charging stall and leaving their car there all day. That means enforcing time limits and it can mean having attendants to monitor EV parking and overtime fees to ensure cars move when they’re topped up,” Ms. Kohn says.

In Oxford’s pilot program, EV owners pay a flat $5 fee to hook up in Level 2 spaces. If they stay overtime after the charge is complete, it’s an additional 15 cents a minute after a grace period. An app on their phones tells the owner they have 15 minutes to go down and move to a regular parking space.

“Where we have Level 3 chargers, we charge $15 and it’s a 30-cents-a-minute overtime fee. It’s equivalent to what we found is being charged in Vancouver and California, where EVs are common,” she explains.
“When we talk to peers in other cities in Canada and the United States, no one has yet come up with what they consider a perfect procedure,” Ms. Kohn notes. An approach some garages use is to make the EV charging zone a valet area, where the cars are monitored. There are indicators on the plug that go dark when the charge is completed and the valet then moves the car.

Deciding where to put the plug-in spaces can be a significant logistical issue, adds Beverly Tay, general manager at Oxford Properties. The charging stations need to be near garage entrances and that competes with handicap parking and car pooling for premium parking spaces. “We’ve considered putting the charging station area at the far end of lots or further from the front door, but you have to consider how to get the power there.”

The hookups can be complicated because in the past, parking structures weren’t wired for high voltage power.

“At RBC WaterPark Place, that was built in 2014, we installed the conduits and wiring as we built the parking garage,” Ms. Tay says. “All the electrical conduit is embedded in the concrete. In older structures, cabling has to be run along ceilings and through walls. That’s part of the cost you have to consider in retrofitting garages for EV charging.”

So far, the 20 spaces allocated for charging at WaterPark Place have kept up with supply on average days. “We researched and found 80 per cent of time tenants do most of their charging at home so we’re offering a service to them if they need it. If people are planning to drive to the cottage [after work] or they’re going on a longer drive, they are more likely to want to charge while at work,” Ms. Kohn says.

Setting up public charging hubs that are the equivalent of gas bars may happen in the future. And as surface-level parking disappears to development in growing city cores, these may have to be located in parking structures.

“We get pitches from companies that want to set up public charging hubs in our garages. We don’t see much demand at this point for people who aren’t tenants wanting to stop in for a charge. However, as EVs become more common, there will likely be more owners who don’t have garages or chargers at home and will be looking to charge at public lots,” Ms. Kohn predicts.

Around the country

In British Columbia, where EV vehicle populations are growing the fastest, the province has taken the lead in installing charging stations. There are now more than 1,000 Level 2 chargers at stations across the province that will fully charge most vehicles in fewer than five hours. And there are 50 B.C. Hydro-installed DC Level 3 chargers that will do that same job in 30 minutes or less, plus a small network of Tesla superchargers for use by Tesla owners.

The City of Vancouver’s building code bylaw was updated in March of 2018 to require that new commercial buildings have at least 10 per cent of parking stalls wired to be ready for EV charging.

Plug In BC’s workplace charging incentive provides companies and building owners with government funding to support the installation of workplace charging infrastructure. The program is open to B.C. registered businesses, building owners, managers, or other building representatives. The incentive covers 50 per cent of total project costs, up to $4,000 per Level 2 station.

Three new rebates, financed with $1.85-million from the British Columbia government as part of its clean energy vehicle program and administered by Plug In BC, an EV advocacy group, are available through March 31, 2020, although the program could end sooner if the funding runs out, the group cautions.

Ontario cancelled the cap and trade program to bring gas prices down and, it says, help lower costs for Ontario families and businesses. As a result, on July 11, 2018, the electric and hydrogen vehicle incentive program was cancelled.

Quebec has a provincial program to reimburse up to 50 per cent of the costs of installing commercial charging stations. The program expires at the end of 2020.

By the numbers

70,000

Approximate number of plug-in cars registered in Canada to date.

66

Average annual percentage increase in electric vehicle sales in Canada over the past five years.

166

Percentage increase in EV sales in the third quarter of 2018 compared to the similar period a year earlier.

8.3

Percentage of all new passenger car sales in Canada that are electric powered.

2 to 1

The ratio of all-electric cars to gas-electric hybrids sold in Canada in 2018.

8.2

Percentage of new car sales that are EVs in Ontario.

15

Percentage of new car sales that are EVs in British Columbia.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford is pushing to eliminate housing shortages in Canada’s largest province, as policy makers seek to deflate pricey markets in places like Toronto without triggering a correction.

Ford’s housing minister, Steve Clark, began consultations this month on proposed reforms that would give local governments more control over their own housing mix to unlock supply and attract investment. In a background document released in November, the ministry touted the economic benefits of adding 10,000 housing starts a year, an amount builders estimate would bring supply closer to demand.

Supply side measures are seen as critical to restoring affordability in some of Canada’s largest cities like Toronto, where prices have doubled since 2010. They would also ease pressure on policy makers to implement demand curbs that are seen as unnecessarily disruptive.

“We have to remove the barriers and the red tape that are getting ahead of housing being built at a more affordable cost,” Clark said in a telephone interview, describing the affordability issue as a “crisis.”

There is already growing concern that tighter mortgage regulations and other recent changes may have overshot, given last year’s plunge in transactions. Demand measures are blunt instruments that apply to all markets regardless of affordability, and disproportionately affect low-income households and youth. Supply measures, in comparison, allow markets to continue growing, albeit at a more sustainable pace.

Toronto, along with Vancouver on the Pacific coast, has the lowest price elasticity of any urban market in Canada, meaning supply is the most out of sync with demand, according to a report last year from the federal housing agency.

Developers agree. It takes about a decade and as many as 52 different reports, studies, checklists and plans to complete a development project in Toronto, according to the Building Industry and Land Development Association. The group estimates the GTA needs 50,000 new units a year to meet projected demand, but only about 40,000 are being built on average.

“The issue in our view for the sharp rise in prices and the affordability issue fundamentally is the supply side not being able to adjust quickly enough to demand,’’ Robert Hogue, senior economist at RBC Capital Markets, said by phone from Toronto. “So a big part of the solution is on the supply side. Except you have to be more patient, because it takes a while.’’ He said Clark’s proposals “ are the right types of measures’’ to ensure market imbalances get addressed more quickly.

Infrastructure Delays

It’s unclear how Clark’s reforms would affect one major contributor to supply bottlenecks: delays to infrastructure projects such as highways and sewer systems. The minister’s proposed changes to the growth plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe, the swath of cities surrounding Toronto that’s home to a quarter of Canada’s population, deal more with speeding up development approvals and updating zoning and intensification targets, rather than streamlining infrastructure regulations that are seen as excessive and unpredictable.

The previous government’s focus on policy ideas just ended up “grinding things down to a halt,” said Joe Vaccaro, chief executive officer at the Ontario Home Builders’ Association. He’s calling on Ford to “clear the decks and get things moving again” by making decisions on several stalled infrastructure projects.

One of those is the Upper York Sewage Solutions Project, a $715 million (Canadian) wastewater treatment system that was supposed to service 30,000 new homes in three towns in York Region, a municipality of about 1.1 million people north of Toronto.

Stalled Sewer

Mike Rabeau, director of capital planning in the region’s environmental services division, began work on the environmental assessment in 2009. Five years and $25 million later, he submitted the 16,000 page report to Ontario’s environment ministry, expecting a decision within eight months. More than four years later, he’s still waiting.

“If you can’t flush a toilet, you can’t build a home,” Rabeau said by phone, adding the expected project completion date is now 2026 at the earliest.

After early signals the project would be approved, environment ministry officials told Rabeau in late 2016 there were some outstanding issues concerning the duty to consult indigenous groups. Discussions between these groups, the provincial government and York Region are ongoing, according to a ministry spokesman.

The delay is typical of a broader problem with building infrastructure in the GTA. “We’re growing at a fairly rapid rate, and we’ve got this conundrum that infrastructure has to go through quite a complex approval process,” James McKellar, a professor at the Schulich School of Business at York University, said in a phone interview. “Our ability to bring infrastructure online in a timely way just doesn’t exist.”

Michael Fenn, a former Ontario deputy minister and a visiting fellow at the Ivey Business School’s Lawrence National Centre, says housing should be given particular emphasis when it comes to infrastructure development. “Keeping housing of a variety of types affordable and available is crucial to the economic success” of the GTA and the country generally, he said.

Clark acknowledges housing supply is a “very complex problem,” and he stopped short of saying the environment minister should approve the York sewage project. He nevertheless understands the municipality’s frustration. “That’s an example of something that, if you talk to the region, is taking way too long to get approved,” he said.

Although it may seem counterintuitive, cash flow is not the be all and end all of investing in real estate.

“Everyone has such a cash flow mindset, and don’t get me wrong, cash flow is amazing and will help support a different lifestyle eventually, but making those dollars year-over-year is where the wealth comes from,” said veteran investor Lee Strauss of Strauss Investments. “If you have an extra $1,000 in your pocket every year, the return on investment is dismal and doesn’t even add up. But if you take $26,000 year-over-year, now we’re talking.”

Strauss is, of course, alluding to tenants paying down a mortgage’s principal balance for the investor while the latter rides the property’s appreciation.

“On average for a single-family dwelling, the principal pay down is going to be about $6,000 a year,” he said. “The other reason is you have an income-producing asset that is hedged against inflation, and that income-producing asset appreciates, on average, 5%.

“If you purchase a $400,000 property and it goes up by 5% in one year, that’s $20,000 in the first year. Five percent appreciation plus mortgage pay down, which you’re not paying and will be about $6,000, is $26,000 in one year.”

Mind, appreciation is a compounding factor.

“After year three, you’re at about $460,000 on an asset you bought for $400,000, and it’s been paid for by somebody else for three years, so now it’s worth more. After three years, the pay down is $18,000. That’s why people have always invested in real estate; they just didn’t know it.”

Laura Martin, COO of Matrix Mortgage Global and director of Private Lending Hub, notes that the process by which equity is built can be expedited in a couple of ways.

“The first process is by lessening the amortization period and increasing the payments of the mortgage in order to pay it down faster. This means there would be next to no cash flow, but there will be less money going towards interest payments on the loan,” she said.

“The second way is to ‘force’ equity in the home by making improvements that will drive up the property’s value. It’s referred to as ‘forced’ because it doesn’t rely on the external factors of appreciation caused by the real estate market.”

Martin adds that the extent to which an investor ameliorates the property should be determined by how far below market value they paid for it.

Mortgages have some of the best terms available of any loan type, says Martin, and that flexibility can be leveraged to purchase more properties.

“At an average of 3.5-4% on a fixed mortgage with down payments of around 25% and with amortization periods at 25 years—coming across such favourable financing terms with other investments is highly unlikely,” she said. “There is also leverage, in terms of using the asset as collateral, to finance other properties, thus making an increase in net worth more attainable.”