Mattamy Homes is leaning into smaller, family-sized housing as Ontario’s housing market keeps slumping. Brad Carr, the company’s chief executive, said the developer is trying to meet buyers where they are by building more of the missing middle, including three-bedroom apartments in residential neighbourhoods.
Over the last 18 months, Carr said the company spent thousands of hours with customers and potential homebuyers to understand what drives home ownership decisions in 2026. He said the goal is to build housing that buyers want at a price they can reach, not just what developers have traditionally preferred to sell.
That push lands as Ontario continues to fight through a real estate downturn and the Greater Toronto Area posts record-low sales for new homes alongside stalled building. Federal and provincial governments recently announced measures meant to revive the sector, including tax rebates and development charge reductions, and Carr said he believes those steps will help shake the market loose.
For Mattamy Homes, the answer is a broader shift toward density without abandoning scale. The company wants to build more missing middle housing, including multi-unit, smaller buildings in typically residential neighbourhoods, after years in which larger units often lost out to more lucrative highrise towers and micro-condos. Toronto is now sitting on a glut of condo supply in shoebox units, even as Ontario faces a projected housing shortage in 2029.
Carr said the company’s measure of success is not margin but volume. “We want to build more houses. Our growth and our definition of success is to have more homes built, more workers employed and more careers created,” he said. “It’s all about volume.”
That is a sharp bet on where the market goes next. If the new incentives do not pull buyers back, the developers best positioned will be the ones that can deliver the kind of homes families have been asking for all along.
