Toronto area home prices continued to rise in August — up 12.6 per cent year over year to an average $1.1 million for all houses and condos — as new listings plunged an “alarming” 43 per cent in the same period, to the lowest level in a decade.

“It is clear that the supply of homes is not keeping pace with demand, and this situation will become worse once immigration into Canada resumes,” said Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB) president Kevin Crigger in a news release Friday.

There were only 10,609 new homes listed this August, compared to 18,599 in August 2020.

In the same one-year period, the average selling price of a home in the GTA rose nearly $120,000.

Home sales also declined 20 per cent annually last month. But this August remained the third best on the TRREB records going back to 1988. Only 2020 and 2016 saw more home transactions in August, the board reported Friday.

The exception to this summer’s return to a traditionally slower summer in real estate sales was in the condo category. Condo transactions rose 11.3 per cent last month compared to last August.

The real estate board’s monthly statistics landed only two days after RBC warned that housing affordability remains “overstretched” in the GTA despite a slowdown in sales since the spring. Affordability, rental market balance, home construction and demographics in Toronto are “significantly outside historical norms, posing much higher risk than usual,” said RBC.

Detached houses saw the biggest drop in sales in August — down 36.6 per cent in the City of Toronto and 30.2 per cent in the 905 areas around the city. At the same time, detached house prices soared 11.2 per cent in Toronto to nearly $1.7 million on average and 25.6 per cent in the 905 to an average selling price of $1.37 million.

Condo prices also rose last month — 7.1 per cent in the city to an average of $720,832 and 14.5 per cent in the suburbs where they sold for $618,997 on average.

Crigger noted that all federal parties have made housing a key plank of their election platforms. But in an apparent swipe at the Liberal plan to ban blind-bidding in real estate sales, he said, “solving supply-related issues is much more important to affordability than interfering with consumer choice during the home buying and selling offer process or revisiting demand-side policies that will at best have a short-term impact on market conditions.”