Saskatoon condo owners need $190K to jump into single home property, study finds

Top regions for affordable homes in Canada Karen Yolevski with Royal LePage Real Estate breaks down the regions across Canada with more affordable home prices.

There is a nearly 90 per cent cost difference between buying a home and a condo in Saskatoon, a recent study found.

The numbers, gathered by Point2Homes, found the benchmark price of a condo in the city is $212,000 while for a single-family home, it’s $400,000 — nearly a $190,000 difference.

With the average wage in Saskatoon pegged at $78,936, Point2Homes estimates it would take a homebuyer 2.4 years to make up the difference.

In Regina, the benchmark house price was $327,000, according to the study. Condo prices were set at $227,000 in the Queen City, meaning homebuyers would need about an extra $100,000 to make the leap.

However, homebuyers elsewhere in Canada could be looking at double the price, the study found.

Many of those cities are in Ontario or British Columbia.

“Upsizing feels particularly unattainable in Vancouver, where houses are over $1.2 million more expensive than a condo: Closing the price gap here would mean putting aside one’s entire income for almost 16 years,” the study said.

Some of the easiest cities to transition from a condo to a home are Trois-Rivières, Quebec, where the difference is $44,000, Halifax, Nova Scotia, where the difference is $84,400, St. John’s, Newfoundland at $85,100 and Sherbrooke, QC at $91,500.