This week: Homeowners who bought condos as starter homes in the pandemic are struggling with their next moves, and developers are hoping AI can help with everyone’s least favourite part of the building process: paperwork.

For decades, the prevailing wisdom across major Canadian cities such as Toronto and Vancouver held that owning a property for at least five years virtually guaranteed a profit. Today, that assumption is being put to the test.

A growing number of Canadians who purchased starter homes at peak market prices are now in a bind. They can sell at a loss, attempt to rent it out in a punishing market, or postpone reaching other major life milestones and gamble on the market rebounding soon.

“At the height of COVID, a lot of people were buying condos in their mid-to-late 20s and the plan was always: ‘let’s wait five years and then sell our condo and buy a house,’” said Toronto realtor Anya Ettinger. “The life plan hasn’t changed … the market has.”

But homes were never meant to be merely an investment, Ms. Ettinger said. “It should never have been the norm.”

Read the full story about the markets in the GTA and Vancouver, and what homeowners are planning now.

Vancouver modernist architect Arno Matis was grappling with a problem that is table stakes for his profession, but has, in recent years, been ratcheted up to the level of national crisis by politicians pressing for solutions to the housing affordability crisis: the amount of time it takes to secure a building permit, which seems to grow longer by the year.

A mid-size project in Vancouver could be bogged down in the approvals process for two or three years. “We saw that there was an issue there,” he told John Lorinc. “Obviously, our clients were getting dragged along for the ride.”

To that end, Mr. Matis’s firm last fall launched a technology-development partnership with an Australian firm, Archistar, that has built AI tools capable of checking whether project proposals comply with zoning rules, building codes and other planning policies.

The goal, say those who’ve worked with these technologies, is to allow planners to spend more of their time on the parts of the approvals process that require their professional judgment instead of slogging through highly repetitive tasks associated with routine permits. Local governments are hopeful it will help ease the bureaucratic burden.

Even with lower interest rates, price growth in major Canadian real estate markets is diverging as cheaper regions post bigger gains than more expensive cities.

The biggest example of this division is in Quebec City, Canada’s strongest market, which had a 14-per-cent increase year-over-year in housing values in January.

On the other hand, Victoria and Toronto were some of the weakest markets in the country in January, as valuations fell and appeared to get little relief from interest rate decreases throughout 2025.

Reporter Salmaan Farooqui spoke to realtors in the Quebec City, Victoria and Toronto markets to try to decipher why they performed so far outside the national average.

Rates shown are the lowest available for each term/type and category (insured vs. uninsured) as of market close on Thursday, Feb. 19.