Here’s the area of Ontario you should move to if you want cheaper real estate prices

With Toronto considered among the most “impossibly affordable” places to try and settle down in the world, some residents have set their sights elsewhere, moving to somewhere else in the province or the country for a better quality of life on the same budget.

If, like many others, you’ve given up on home ownership in the overpriced GTA but would consider relocating within Ontario, there is another region just a few hours’ drive away that is home to multiple far more affordable municipalities.

Towns around the Ottawa area are some of the province’s most reasonable for real estate right now, with the nation’s capital itself also making a new top 10 list of most cost-effective cities to purchase a home in given average prices, income levels, and other factors.

The ranking, which comes from Canadian real estate listing site Zolo, looked at the aforementioned figures from nearly 100 small-to-large cities in the province, also taking into consideration the overall success of each locale’s economy, its population growth, and unemployment rate.

Topping the index is Nepean, a former township of its own that is now considered part of Ottawa, where the average home price is just $572,388 as of March 2024, and the typical household income is $137,000 (meanwhile, in Toronto, the average home price is around $1.2 million, necessitating an annual income of $215,920 to comfortably carry).

Next is Cartleton Place, classified as a small city about 40 minutes away from Ottawa. Here, the average house or condo is an even lower $555,174, while residents’ household income falls around $100,700.

Half of the ten most affordable small-to-large cities in Ontario to buy a home in are near Ottawa, according to Zolo.

Rounding out the top five for affordability were Kanata (with a mean home price of $810,021 and average income of $146,600), Tilsonburg ($588,172 and $87,600), and Arnprior ($482,732 and $92,300), two of which are in close proximity to Ottawa. 

All entries on the list have far lower unemployment rates than Toronto’s current rate of 7.8 per cent — one of the highest in the country — ranging from 3.8 to 5.1 per cent. A total of five of the most affordable cities in the province, per this data, are in the Ottawa area.