Yorkville vs The Annex: One Code, Two Real Markets

Published 10 September 2026 · By Jatin Dua, Broker of Record, RE/MAX Quantum Realty

Last updated 10 September 2026. Written by Jatin Dua, Broker of Record at RE/MAX Quantum Realty, 799 The Queensway, Etobicoke · Toronto neighbourhood comparison · 9 min read

Quick answer

Better for whom? These two are barely rivals, because on MLS they are the same place. TRREB files every Yorkville sale under the community Annex in district C02, and the City of Toronto has no Yorkville neighbourhood at all, so any “average Yorkville price” you have been shown was assembled by whoever showed it to you. The honest measure of the difference is the spread inside that one community: in Q1 2026 Annex condo apartments averaged $1,192K against a median of $818K, a 46% gap. The mean is Yorkville. The median is the Annex. And if you want a freehold house, only one side of this sells them.

On MLS, this is a comparison with itself

I get asked to compare these two several times a year, and the first thing I have to say usually lands badly: they are not two entries in a database. They are one entry. TRREB reports sales in district C02, and C02 contains exactly four communities — Annex, Casa Loma, Wychwood and Yonge-St. Clair. Yorkville is not one of them. Every branded residence, every Hazelton Avenue conversion and every Scollard Street cottage is filed under Annex, next to a converted house with six tenants in it.

The City map is no help either. Yorkville Ave at Hazelton and Yorkville Ave at Bay both sit inside neighbourhood #95 Annex, and the far north-east corner near Bloor and Yonge falls into #98 Rosedale-Moore Park. There is no City of Toronto Yorkville. There never was one after 1883.

ANY YORKVILLE AVERAGE PRICE WAS INVENTEDNo institution publishes a Yorkville average, because no institution has a Yorkville boundary. Every figure you have seen was either hand-curated by the person publishing it or is an Annex number wearing a Yorkville label. Ask which specific sales went into it. If nobody can tell you, the number is decoration, not data.

Where the line actually falls

Yorkville, as the people who live there use the word, runs Bloor St W to Davenport Rd, Yonge St to Avenue Rd. The traditional Annex runs Dupont St to Bloor St W, Bathurst St to Avenue Rd. So Avenue Road is the seam — a street, not a boundary anyone records.

It gets one layer worse. The City’s Annex is much larger than the traditional Annex: it extends east across Avenue Rd to Yonge and swallows Yorkville whole. So when you read an Annex statistic, ask which of the three Annexes it describes — the traditional one, the City’s one, or TRREB’s one. They are not the same shape.

The short version of that

Avenue Road divides these two places in every way except the ones that get measured. When you compare “Yorkville” to “the Annex,” you are usually comparing the top of one distribution with the middle of the same distribution.

What 64 sales in one quarter actually contain

Two dating notes before the table. Community-level figures are Q1 2026 (January to March), the most recent quarter TRREB publishes at community level and therefore roughly six months old as I write this. District condo figures are Q2 2026.

Annex community, Q1 2026	Sales	Average	Median	Days on market	Sale-to-list
Detached	5	$2,159K	$2,171K	34	104%
Semi-detached	9	$1,671K	$1,430K	20	99%
Condo apartment	48	$1,192K	$818K	42	96%
All types	64	$1,352,721	$948,000	38	97%

Attached/row and condo townhouse recorded one sale each and TRREB suppressed both prices. Read the top two rows first: five detached sales at 104% of list in 34 days, nine semis at 99% in 20 days. Small samples — five and nine — so treat them as direction rather than precision. The direction is clear enough: the freehold Annex is competitive.

Now read the condo line. Forty-eight sales against 207 new listings in the same quarter, a 23% sales-to-new-listings ratio, 42 days on market, 96% of asking. Inside one community, in one quarter, the house market and the apartment market were moving in opposite directions. That single fact is why a blended “Annex average price” of $1,352,721 tells you almost nothing useful.

The 46% spread, and what it does to your comparables

Halfway down that list of 48 condo sales, a unit traded at $818,000. The mean sat 46% higher at $1,192K. A gap that size only happens one way: a thin tail of very expensive trades dragging the average away from the middle. That tail is Yorkville. It is the most defensible way I know to demonstrate the Yorkville premium without inventing a Yorkville number, and I would rather show you the shape of the distribution than a figure I made up.

The wider district repeats the pattern. C02 condo apartments in Q2 2026: 122 sales, average $1,287,436, median $822,500, 393 new listings, 239 active, 94% of list and 43 average days on market. Same shape, larger sample, and a sale-to-list ratio that should give any seller pause.

What this means when you write an offer

If you are buying in the tail — a branded residence, a large corner unit, anything with a hotel name on the door — your appraiser’s comparable set will be small and widely dispersed, and your lender is working from that same small set. If you are buying an ordinary apartment north of Bloor, the $1,192K figure has nothing to do with you. Your market is the $818K one.

Cottages, Annex style, and the towers in between

Yorkville’s stock is luxury high-rise condominium and branded-residence hotel-condo sitting on a surviving base of Victorian workers’ cottages and semis on Hazelton, Scollard, Berryman and Yorkville Aves, most long since converted into galleries, boutiques and restaurants. The cottages date from the 1830s to the 1880s; the towers start in the 1970s and accelerate after 2000. The named hotels and branded residences include the Four Seasons, the Park Hyatt, the Windsor Arms, The Hazelton and W Toronto.

The Annex is large late-Victorian and Edwardian detached and semi-detached houses, very heavily converted to multiplexes, rooming houses and student rentals, plus low-rise apartment blocks along Bloor and Spadina and a small number of condo buildings. It followed Simeon Janes’s 1886 subdivision, “the Toronto Annex,” and was annexed to Toronto in 1887, with Seaton Village following in 1888.

Annex style is a real, named architectural type, not an estate-agent flourish — a Toronto synthesis of American Richardsonian Romanesque and British Queen Anne Revival, with large rounded arches and turrets. The template is E.J. Lennox’s Lewis Lukes residence at 37 Madison Avenue, completed 1887; Lennox also designed Old City Hall and Casa Loma. Jane Jacobs lived at 69 Albany Ave from 1971 until her death in 2006.

Yorkville’s history is the older of the two. It was an independent municipality for 30 years — founded 1830, a village in 1853, annexed by Toronto on 1 February 1883 — and the old village coat of arms is now bolted to Toronto Fire Services Station #312. It was also the Canadian centre of the hippie movement, and Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Gordon Lightfoot all came up through its coffeehouses.

Schools, and who is actually here

Both sides are served by Jesse Ketchum Junior and Senior Public School, 61 Davenport Rd, JK-8, with over 500 students whose backgrounds represent 55 countries. The Annex adds Huron Street Junior Public School at 541 Huron St (JK-6, roughly 270 students, with an on-site daycare), Harbord Collegiate Institute at 286 Harbord St, established 1892, now over 900 students with French Immersion and a Math and Science Focus programme, and Central Technical School at 725 Bathurst St, founded 1915. Yorkville has very few school-age families and that one JK-8 school. Check catchments on the TDSB “Find Your School” tool by address — I would not take a catchment from any article, including this one.

Getting around, and the highway neither of you gets

The Annex is one of the best-served neighbourhoods in Toronto for subway. Four stations serve it — Spadina, St George, Dupont and Bathurst — and two of them, St George and Spadina, are Line 1 / Line 2 interchanges. The 511 Bathurst and 510 Spadina streetcars run down its western and eastern flanks, and the 26 Dupont crosses the top.

Yorkville has Bloor-Yonge and Museum on Line 1 and Bay and Bloor-Yonge on Line 2. Bloor-Yonge is the busiest interchange in the system, which is a convenience at 10am and something else entirely at 8:30am. Surface routes are the 6 Bay and the 94 Wellesley.

Neither has a GO station or a UP Express stop. The nearest UP stop is Bloor at Dundas West, roughly 3 km west of Yorkville and roughly 2 km west of the Annex along Line 2. Highway access is genuinely poor on both sides: from Yorkville it is Avenue Rd or Mount Pleasant north to the Allen, or the DVP via Bayview. The Annex has no expressway for a specific reason — the neighbourhood stopped the Spadina Expressway, which would have divided it in half. The Ontario Line does not serve either of these neighbourhoods, whatever a listing may imply.

Where each one will let you down

Yorkville first, and none of this is a reason not to buy — it is a reason to buy with your eyes open.

Liquidity is thin. C02 transacted 122 condo apartments in the whole of Q2 2026 against 393 new listings and 239 active, and the Annex community managed a 23% sales-to-new-listings ratio in Q1. Comparables are unreliable and price dispersion is wide.
The weakest sale-to-list discipline downtown. C02 condo apartments ran 94% of list in Q2 2026 and took 43 days. Sellers here routinely accept meaningful discounts, which cuts both ways depending on which side of the deal you are on.
Hotel-grade services carry hotel-grade fees. Verify them building by building. I will not publish a typical figure because no credible source publishes one.
The Bloor and Yonge interface. Yorkville sits statistically inside Annex, where the 2025 assault rate was 1,080.9 per 100,000 against 767.9 city-wide. The neighbouring Yonge-Bay Corridor recorded 3,361 per 100,000 in 2025 — 4.4 times the city rate — with robbery at 300 per 100,000. That corner is a different environment after dark.

Now the Annex, where the problems are more domestic and more expensive to fix.

Break and enter runs at double the city rate. 387.1 per 100,000 in 2025 against 189.5 city-wide. Auto theft was 116.9, well below the city’s 225, so the risk pattern here is doors and windows, not driveways.
Conversion quality varies block to block. A heavy student and transient population means rooming-house conversions, absentee landlords and visibly variable upkeep on some streets. Walk the block on a Tuesday evening, not a Sunday morning.
Freehold entry is very expensive. A detached median of $2,171K and a semi median of $1,430K in Q1 2026, on five and nine sales respectively.
Old houses carry old-house costs. Knob-and-tube, undersized panels and original drains are routine in stock built between 1886 and the 1910s.

Mirvish Village, and what else is changing

The Annex’s defining change is finishing this season. Mirvish Village, on the former Honest Ed’s site at Bloor St W and Bathurst St, is roughly 900 purpose-built rental units across seven buildings of 8 to 27 storeys, with 200,000 sq ft of commercial space and direct access to Bathurst station. The Kitchen is a 19,000 sq ft food hall, bar and live-music venue; Honest Ed’s Alley holds 25 micro-retail incubator pods of 150 to 300 sq ft; ten restored heritage houses line Markham Street.

As of June 2026, 748 Bathurst was roughly 85% leased and the middle complex of 428 units roughly 80% leased or occupied. Peterson Group took full control from Westbank in early 2026, the Alley opened in Summer 2026 and the remaining buildings were ready late summer. Nine hundred new rental units at one intersection is a real supply event for anyone buying an Annex investment property.

Yorkville’s equivalent change happened a decade ago and is finished. Yorkville Village at 55 Avenue Road opened in October 1976 as Hazelton Lanes, designed by Boris Zerafa of Webb Zerafa Menkès Housden; First Capital Realty acquired it in September 2011 and rebranded it on 25 January 2016 after a CA$100 million redevelopment — 210,000 sq ft anchored by Whole Foods Market and Equinox Fitness since 3 February 2016. Village of Yorkville Park on Cumberland St, built 1992-94 to a Martha Schwartz design after a 1991 international competition, arranges eleven garden rooms along the property lines of the Victorian row houses demolished in the 1950s to cut the Bloor subway. It won the ASLA Landmark Award in 2012.

One more thing to keep straight

If someone quotes you a “C02 average,” they are blending four communities. In Q1 2026 Casa Loma ran 16 sales averaging $2,232,125 with a median of $1,762,500; Wychwood ran 17 sales averaging $1,547,029 at 105% of list in 21 days; Yonge-St. Clair ran 32 sales averaging $1,738,750. Four different places, one district code.

Who should buy which

I would put it this way, and I would rather talk someone out of a purchase than into one.

Yorkville suits downsizers trading a Rosedale or Forest Hill house for a serviced apartment, international and pied-a-terre buyers, and empty-nesters who want to walk to the ROM and Holt Renfrew — provided you would not be forced to sell into a market that trades 122 units a quarter.
The Annex suits buyers who want a freehold house on the subway, academics and University of Toronto affiliates, people who want architecture over new-build finishes, and student-rental investors who have read the break-and-enter number and priced the maintenance honestly.
Neither suits a buyer who needs a highway, a GO train, or a street full of school-age children. If any of those three are non-negotiable, you are shopping in the wrong pair of neighbourhoods.

If you want to test any of this against a specific building or a specific block, the condo value estimator is a reasonable starting point, and my market report tracks the district numbers as TRREB releases them.

Common questions

Is Yorkville part of the Annex?

On both official maps, yes. TRREB files Yorkville sales under the community Annex in district C02, and the City of Toronto has no Yorkville neighbourhood — Yorkville Ave at Hazelton and at Bay both fall inside neighbourhood #95 Annex, with the far north-east corner in #98 Rosedale-Moore Park. Locally they are treated as two places split by Avenue Road, but no dataset draws that line.

What is the average condo price in Yorkville?

Nobody publishes one, because there is no Yorkville boundary to publish it for. The closest defensible figure is the Annex community that contains Yorkville: in Q1 2026 condo apartments there averaged $1,192K against a median of $818K across 48 sales. That 46% gap is the Yorkville premium showing up as a thin tail of expensive trades rather than as a separate average.

Are Annex houses selling faster than Annex condos?

Considerably faster. In Q1 2026 Annex semi-detached houses sold in an average 20 days at 99% of list across nine sales, and detached at 104% of list in 34 days across five sales. Condo apartments took 42 days at 96%, with 48 sales against 207 new listings. Those freehold samples are small, so read them as direction rather than precision.

How many subway stations serve the Annex?

Four — Spadina, St George, Dupont and Bathurst — and two of them, St George and Spadina, are Line 1 and Line 2 interchanges. Yorkville has Bloor-Yonge and Museum on Line 1 and Bay and Bloor-Yonge on Line 2, with Bloor-Yonge the busiest interchange in the system. Neither neighbourhood has a GO station or a UP Express stop.

How safe is the Annex compared with Yorkville?

They share a statistic, since Yorkville sits inside neighbourhood #95 Annex. Toronto Police Service 2025 rates for that area were assault 1,080.9 per 100,000 against 767.9 city-wide, break and enter 387.1 against 189.5, and auto theft 116.9 against 225. The neighbouring Yonge-Bay Corridor recorded 3,361 assaults and 300 robberies per 100,000, which is why the Bloor and Yonge corner reads differently after dark.

Does the Ontario Line serve Yorkville or the Annex?

No. Neither neighbourhood is on the Ontario Line route, and no listing should suggest otherwise. Neither has a GO station either; the nearest UP Express stop is Bloor at Dundas West, roughly 3 km west of Yorkville and 2 km west of the Annex along Line 2. Highway access is poor on both sides — Avenue Rd or Mount Pleasant north to the Allen, or the DVP via Bayview.

Comparing an Annex house and a Yorkville condo?

Send me both addresses. I will pull the building-level and street-level comparables, the real days on market and what actually sold rather than what was listed, then tell you which one I would write on and why. If the honest answer is neither, you will hear that first.

Book a 15-minute call or call or text 833-330-1925.

No pressure, no drip campaign. If the answer is “neither, wait six months”, I will tell you that.

Yorkville or The Annex? One MLS Code, Two Different Places