4,254
Permits in the approval queue
Six months. 14,709 permits. $6.05B in declared construction value. And underneath it: who is building, who is designing, which shows draw them out, and where the next wave breaks. Know the projects. Reach the decision makers.
Monthly permit issuance more than tripled from early 2024 (around 830 a month) to 2026 (regularly past 2,500 a month). On a clean quarter-over-quarter basis, Q1 2026 issued 6,978 permits against 3,930 in Q1 2025, a 78% jump, with declared value up 109% to $3.52B. H1 2026 as a whole closed at 14,709 permits and $6.05B in declared value, up 62% and 55% year-over-year versus H1 2025 (9,086 permits, $3.90B).
An earlier version of this report showed a sharp drop in April to June 2026 and attributed it to normal City of Toronto reporting lag. That explanation was wrong: a pipeline issue was writing a stale issued_date to a subset of recent permits, which pushed them out of the H1 window and understated recent months. The underlying data has since been corrected, and the figures and chart on this page reflect the fix: April to June 2026 now read as a continuation of the year's growth, not a decline.
New-building (BLD) permits were just 1,504 of H1 volume yet accounted for $2.39B, roughly 92% of all declared value. The thousands of smaller permits are noise on the dollar line.
The Yonge and St. Clair pocket logged just 38 permits but $808M of declared value in H1, the fingerprint of a single mega-development moving through approvals.
February and March alone created 3,201 dwelling units. Unit creation clusters in transit-served corridors, not the luxury single-family pockets that dominate the dollar charts.
Filtered to H1 permits with a resolved neighbourhood, declared value concentrates hard along the Yonge spine: St. Clair, the Bay corridor, Eglinton. A further $833M sits in permits not yet geo-tagged, an enrichment gap we quantify in the data section.
Every Toronto neighbourhood shaded by mapped construction activity, brighter lime means busier. Toggle between project count and declared value, and hover any area for its numbers.
Two completely different markets are hiding in one city. The value map (St. Clair, Bay, Eglinton) is high-rise: long timelines, large GCs, consultant-heavy teams. The volume map (Annex, Rosedale, Banbury, Stonegate) is renovation and infill: shorter cycles, owner or small-builder decision makers, faster yes.
A cabinetry or HVAC trade should not chase the same postal codes as a structural or curtain-wall specialist. Builtie segments both so a rep works the corridor that actually buys their scope.
South Parkdale logged 102 new units on just 42 permits in H1, the highest unit-per-permit density of any active pocket. That is a purpose-built rental signature, and the kind of early tell Builtie surfaces before it shows up in a press release.
Ranked by total declared construction value across the tracked permit history. Public infrastructure (Metrolinx, TTC, the city agencies) sits at the very top by sheer dollars, but the names a trade dreams of working with are the private residential developers right beneath them, and every one is reachable in Builtie with a website, LinkedIn, and contact.
| # | Builder / Developer | Type | Declared value | Permits | Projects | Res % | Reachable |
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Times Group, Fitzrovia, Reserve Properties, Menkes, Concord Adex, Aspen Ridge, Capital Developments, CentreCourt, Marlin Spring and Daniels are the private engines of GTA housing supply. They each run multiple concurrent projects and they each have a known decision maker in our database. For a trade, this is not a prospect list. It is a target list.
Ranked by distinct projects each firm appears on across the tracked development record. Architects and design consultants are the upstream signal: they are on a project years before a trade is awarded, which makes them the earliest reachable relationship in the entire chain.
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Two wind-and-acoustics firms, Gradient Wind and RWDI, appear on 661 and 602 projects respectively. Practically no tall building in Toronto gets approved without one of them in the room. If you sell into high-rise, these consultants are the single most concentrated referral surface in the market, and they almost never appear on anyone's outreach list.
Every major GTA builder, scored by how concentrated their consultant and trade choices are. "Locked" means one firm owns most of the work. "Spreads" means the account is winnable.
| Builder | Role | Their firm | Share | Projects |
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A firm that pays for an exhibition stand is a firm in growth mode, telling the market it is open for business. Builtie proved the model on the Toronto Home Show: the full exhibitor list was captured and matched to live company records, decision-makers and ad activity. The result is a ready-made, high-intent outreach cohort pulled from a single event.
From a raw exhibitor list to an outreach-ready cohort, in one pass.
Two events are captured. These are the next targets. Ingesting each exhibitor list and scoring it the same way turns the whole calendar into a pipeline.
Not every show is equal. Builtie scores an event on three axes once its exhibitor list is in: how many exhibitors fit the ICP, how many already have a reachable decision-maker, and how many are running ads. On that test the Toronto Home Show scores high, 84% decision-maker coverage (155 of 184) with 30 exhibitors actively spending. Interior Design Show (IDS) is a smaller floor: 20 exhibitors matched, 65% decision-maker coverage (13 of 20), 4 running ads. Still worth working, at a lighter touch. Apply the same score to the Buildings Show and the rest, and you can tell a client exactly which floors to work and which to skip, before they buy a single ticket.
Beyond permits, Builtie tracks 5,774 named GTA developments and their construction status. The pipeline is heavily front-loaded: 3,440 projects sit in pre-construction and 668 are actively under construction. That is more than 4,100 live or imminent projects, each one a team of trades waiting to be mapped.
3,440 pre-construction projects are the leading indicator: design teams locked, trades not yet awarded. This is the prospecting frontier.
668 under construction are live job sites today, the window for material, finishing and late-trade scopes.
Only 111 projects are cancelled or on hold, under 2% of the record. The GTA pipeline is not stalling, it is stacking.
The tallest towers currently pre-construction or under construction, by storeys. Each carries a full known project team in Builtie, from developer down to consultants.
Pinnacle One Yonge rises 106 storeys and is the tallest tower under construction in Canada. Concord Sky carries a 15-company team in our record. 83 Bloor West, still pre-construction, already shows 17 firms. Every storey is a stack of scopes, and Builtie already knows the names attached to each one.
The median permit now issues in a month, and the worst-case wait has halved since 2024.
At the current 30-day median, most of this issues in H2. These are the job sites of September.
Unlocking the full H1 2026 report…