Saving up for a home in Toronto has become somewhat of a joke, the cost of living in and around the city ballooning faster than many can keep up with. And it's only growing worse, according to the latest report from the Building Industry and Land Development Association (BILD) covering February's housing market activity.

You already have to be fairly wealthy to buy into the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) market, and data sourced from Altus Group shows that the critical imbalance between housing supply and demand is only pushing stratospheric prices further out of reach for young first-time homebuyers.

Benchmark prices, or the value of a typical home in the GTA based on the most popular features such as the number of bedrooms, climbed by double digits across the board in February.

The benchmark price for a new condominium apartment shot up 13 per cent in the last year to a lofty $1,177,739, while the single-family home benchmark price experienced substantial growth of 35.3 per cent, now sitting at an outrageously high $1,858,713.

"GTA benchmark new home prices set record highs in February in both the single-family and condominium apartment sectors," said Edward Jegg, Manager of Research Consulting at Altus Analytics, Altus Group. "Low available inventory, particularly for single-family homes, continues to exert upward pressure on prices."

This crunch on supply is evident in sales statistics for February, when 3,630 new homes were sold, a 17 per cent spike above the ten-year average.

A significant share of these sales, at 3,048 units, were in the low, medium and high-rise buildings, stacked townhouses and loft categories, a 78 per cent leap over Feb. 2021 and 67 per cent higher than the ten-year average for this submarket.

On the flip side, only 582 new single-family homes were sold in Feb., a 54 per cent dip below the ten-year average, while remaining inventory dropped to a record-low of just 546 units region-wide.

"The steep increases in benchmark prices that we have seen over the last few years reflect our region's critically low supply of new homes," said Dave Wilkes, BILD President & CEO, warning that, "If this trend continues unchecked, we are all going to feel the effects."