Earlier this week, urban affairs reporter Duncan McAllister published a radio interview he conducted with condo kingpin Brad Lamb on his YouTube account.
In his usual brazen style, Lamb takes Toronto’s housing market bears to task over their persistent concerns of overbuilding in the city’s condo market. He also called media coverage of some condos’ questionable building standards “unfiltered horse shit.”
“Machines break, things break. Accidents happen. Windows will fall off buildings. You can’t build a building where windows will never fall off a building,” he said.
“You can never build anything to the absolute perfect level of safety where things don’t happen.”
Read on for more quotes from the interview.
Brad Lamb on the strength of Toronto’s resale market
- “The resale business, whether condos or houses, is still extremely strong. It’s a sellers market, the average time to sell is somewhere around 35 or 40 days currently. In the US, it’s like 300 days.”
- “We’ve been spoiled, where the time to sell in Toronto has been as low as 20 days. That’s an obscenely hot market which cannot sustain itself. So you still see bids, you still see properties that sell for bids, you still see certain houses sell with multiple offers on them. But I don’t believe that’s going to be a normal thing, we don’t want to see that and it’s not something we should expect.”
…on the new construction market in Toronto
- “The real thing that has driven our condo market has been investors. So when you saw lineups of people waiting to buy units, there was a reason for that. Those people would be making, if they bought, put 15 per cent down and waited four years, they would make a two or three hundred per cent return on their money. And that makes anyone want to line up.”
- “[T]here’s no overhanging unsold inventory of condos that’s gonna cause a supply glut. So, what’s actually going to happen is we’re going to have a supply shortage and in two years, you’re going to see not enough condos available for people who want to buy them.”
- “The real thing that’s going to happen here is we’re going to underserve the demand and we’re going to have a price spike in two years.”
…on why his land development company doesn’t build in the suburbs
- “I think that the Canadian suburbs have been ruined by visionless developers that have polluted the countryside with garbage.”
- “I hate the Canadian suburbs. They embarrass me. That we’ve done this to our country. To our beautiful countryside. You know, there’s a right and a wrong way to build subdivisions.”
- “Victorian houses were built in the Victorian era. And Georgian houses were built in the Georgian era. And we’re building these weird mutant houses that borrow from five styles that were popular 100 years ago and none of them look good together.”
Listen in on the full interview here:
