1,180 homes for sale in Vaughan

Vaughan sits directly north of Toronto and has changed more in twenty years than any other municipality in York Region. The Vaughan Metropolitan Centre, at the end of the subway's Line 1 extension, is a purpose-built downtown that did not exist in 2010 and is now a cluster of towers, offices and a bus terminal. Around it, Vaughan is a collection of distinct older communities: Woodbridge with its Italian-Canadian high street, Maple, Thornhill along the Toronto border, Concord's industrial belt, and the historic village of Kleinburg in the northwest.

The result is a city with two separate housing markets. One is new condominium stock, concentrated in the Metropolitan Centre and along the subway, aimed at buyers who want transit into Toronto without Toronto prices. The other is established detached and townhouse housing in Woodbridge, Maple and Thornhill, much of it built from the 1980s onward on generous lots, and bought largely by families moving up or moving out from the city. Detached houses remain the single largest category of what is for sale.

What a buyer should know is that the subway changed the calculation here and has not finished doing so. A property's value in Vaughan is increasingly a function of its distance from Highway 7 and the Line 1 stations, and that is a different map from the one that governed the city when its subdivisions were laid out. Canada's Wonderland, Vaughan Mills and the hospital at Major Mackenzie are the other anchors that structure local traffic and demand.