The average price of a house sold on the Bridle Path in Toronto is over $16 million.
It’s a neighbourhood of excess wealth, ostentatious mega-mansions and the 0.1 per cent of society.
But in and amongst all those over-the-top houses, you’ll find 48 The Bridle Path, a 103- by 260-foot piece of land with a vine covered bungalow that has sat abandoned since 2017, if not longer.
Construction happening across the street.
Normally when plots of land become available in the Bridle Path, it’s just a matter of time before a cavalcade of construction workers arrive to build the next mansion.
However, that’s not what happened at all at 48 The Bridle Path.
In 2017, the property sold for $6,100,000 after just a week on the market. But less than a year later, it was back up for sale for $7,995,000. It took two years and four tries before it finally sold for $6,500,000 in 2019.
Then 48 The Bridle Path just sat there for years.
Overgrown vines on the side of the house.
Seasons came. Seasons went. Vines slowly took over the house, and someone still had to pay $23,000 in annual property tax.
Then in 2024, after five years of nothing, the house was listed “as is, where is” for $10,980,000.
After 50 days on the market, the listing price dropped by almost $1 million to $8,999,000.
But after 253 days with no sale, owners have dropped the price again to $7,980,000.
48 The Bridle Path from the street.
All of this may make one wonder what could be wrong with the property if for the last eight years, no one managed to buy it up and build a liveable house on it.
It’s certainly not as if there isn’t enough space. So what’s the deal? Is the land cursed? Are permits really that hard to get? Possibly.
But probably more likely is that the people who would be buying 48 The Bridle Path are just buying it as an investment or a place to park their cash, since property values in the Bridle Path have this funny tendency to go up around 50 per cent every year.
From a return on investment point of view, it is infinitely better than any stock, bond, EFT you could buy.
The side of the house.
If you think of it that way, why would someone bother going through the headache of getting the necessary building permits, crafting architectural drawings, hiring contractors and the like if they could just do nothing and still make bank?
