Davisville Village vs Leaside: Six Months of Line 5

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, and for what. Leaside is the answer if you need a house, a garden and a top-1% public high school, and you can spend north of $2.2 million. Davisville Village is the answer if you want a midtown apartment under $700,000 with a Line 1 station you can walk to. Both received Line 5 Eglinton on 8 February 2026. The number that separates them is the benchmark: in August 2026 TRREB’s C10 composite sat at $929,600, up 2.56% year over year, the only rising district benchmark in midtown or north Toronto against a city-wide fall of 3.73%. C11’s detached benchmark, which covers Leaside, was down 6.93%.

Line 5 opened in February. Only one of these benchmarks went up

On 8 February 2026 Leaside went from zero rapid transit to two underground stations in a single day. Leaside station sits at Bayview Avenue and Eglinton Avenue, underground, with its main entrance at the south-east corner and a second entrance north-west in a retail parking lot. Laird station is at Laird Drive and Eglinton, the easternmost underground station on the line’s main tunnel before it surfaces toward Kennedy. Davisville Village sits on the other end of the same line, with the Eglinton interchange it already had and the new Mount Pleasant station at Mount Pleasant Road and Eglinton, which reuses the catalogued, brick-by-brick-disassembled facade of the 1928 Imperial Bank of Canada building.

Every marketing piece written before February said the Crosstown would lift Leaside values. Six months of TRREB data says otherwise. In the August 2026 MLS Home Price Index, C11 — the district that contains Leaside — posted a detached benchmark of $2,227,300, down 6.93% year over year, an attached benchmark of $1,348,400 down 8.43%, a townhouse benchmark of $547,800 down 8.49% and an apartment benchmark of $428,300 down 6.33%. The composite was $1,167,400, down 3.11%. Over the same window, C10 — Davisville Village’s district — recorded a composite of $929,600, up 2.56%, with its apartment benchmark at $597,900, down only 1.53% against a city apartment figure of −6.88%.

If you remember one thing

A brand-new rapid transit line did not raise house prices in Leaside. In the six months after Line 5 opened, C11’s detached benchmark fell 6.93% and its attached benchmark 8.43%. Anyone quoting you a Crosstown premium is arguing against TRREB’s own index.

The C11 label, and the two Davisvilles

Before the money, the geography, because both of these names are traps. Leaside is TRREB district C11 — but C11 is shared with Flemingdon Park and Thorncliffe Park, two of the city’s most apartment-heavy and lowest-priced communities. TRREB does track “Leaside” as a distinct community inside C11, and that is the number to use. The City side is simpler: neighbourhood #56 Leaside-Bennington, which came through the 2022 restructure unchanged. Bennington Heights is the pocket south and west of the core, between Moore Avenue and the Don valley. “South Leaside” is a local trade name, not an official unit of anything.

A C11 AVERAGE IS NOT A LEASIDE PRICEIn August 2026 the C11 condo apartment average was $442,533 across 15 sales, and the district median across all types was $635,000. Those are Thorncliffe and Flemingdon numbers. The Leaside community detached average in Q1 2026 was $2,351,000. If a listing or an article quotes you a district figure as a Leaside figure, it is off by more than a million dollars.

Davisville Village has the opposite problem. TRREB files it under C10, across the communities of Mount Pleasant West and Mount Pleasant East. The City split the legacy neighbourhood #104 Mount Pleasant West in April 2022 into #173 North Toronto and #174 South Eglinton-Davisville, and a great many portals and older data sets still report the old #104. The practical effect is that two buyers can say “Davisville” and mean opposite halves of the same postal identity: west of Mount Pleasant Road along the Yonge spine it is overwhelmingly high-rise; east of Mount Pleasant Road, in City neighbourhood #99 Mount Pleasant East, it is 1920s and 1930s brick, 29.9% single-detached and 22.0% semi-detached, with 51.5% of the stock built before 1960.

What each market actually recorded

Community-level figures below are Q1 2026 (January to March), the most recent quarter TRREB publishes at community geography and therefore roughly six months old as I write. Several segments are thin, so the sale counts sit in the table where you can weigh them.

Q1 2026, TRREB community	Leaside (in C11)	Davisville area (in C10)
Detached	16 sales, avg $2,351K, median $2,250K, 36 days, 98% of list	Mount Pleasant East: 13 sales, avg $2,125K, median $2,100K, 9 days, 100%
Semi-detached	4 sales, avg $1,269K, median $1,343K, 16 days, 101%	Mount Pleasant East: 12 sales, avg $1,523K, median $1,418K, 20 days, 106%
Condo apartment	6 sales, avg $697K, median $718K, 28 days, 96%	Mount Pleasant West: 89 sales, avg $632K, median $615K, 40 days, 97%
Condo townhouse	0 sales	not separately meaningful
New condo listings	not separately published	226 in Mount Pleasant West — a 39% sales-to-new-listings ratio
Detached, high-rise side	—	Mount Pleasant West: 4 sales, avg $2,323K, 2 days, 104%

Two results in that table are not what people expect. First, the Leaside semi-detached average is lower than the Mount Pleasant East semi-detached average — $1,269K against $1,523K — though the Leaside figure rests on four sales and should not be read as a price level. Second, Leaside detached sold at 36 days on market against nine days for a Mount Pleasant East detached. The house that carries the famous school catchment took four times as long to sell as the house that does not.

At district level in August 2026, C10 recorded 35 sales, an average of $970,538, a median of $770,000, 199 active listings and 3.8 months of inventory against 4.6 city-wide, at 97% of list in 33 days. C11 recorded 32 sales, an average of $1,240,438 and 4.1 months of inventory at 98% in 25 days. Year to date, C10 has 426 sales averaging $1,011,121; C11 has 230 averaging $1,327,118.

Two markets that are not competing for the same buyer

Set the labels aside and look at what is actually on offer. Leaside, City neighbourhood #56, has 6,435 households: 3,570 single-detached (55.5%), 795 semi-detached, 1,410 apartments in buildings under five storeys and only 515 in buildings of five storeys or more. Owner-occupancy is 72.4%. The 2020 median household income was $148,000 and the average $284,400 — the average is 1.9 times the median, the widest gap in midtown, which tells you there is a small very-high-income cohort sitting above a large solid professional middle.

The high-rise half of Davisville is the mirror image. City neighbourhood #174 South Eglinton-Davisville holds 13,185 households, of which 11,295 — 85.7% — are apartments in buildings of five storeys or more, against 475 detached houses; tenure runs 69.6% renter and the 2020 median household income was $80,000. Next door, #173 North Toronto has 9,430 households, 8,475 of them in five-plus-storey apartments, 81.4% renter, and fifteen single-detached houses in the entire neighbourhood. Nearly a third of #173’s stock — 2,915 households — was built between 2016 and 2021.

That is the real difference. In Leaside you are buying into a place where three out of five homes are detached and three out of four are owner-occupied. In the Yonge-spine half of Davisville you are buying into a place where four out of five households rent. Neither is better. They are different products with different resale audiences, and if you are unsure what your own building is worth in that market, the condo value estimator is a reasonable starting point before you talk to anyone.

Getting around, now that both have the Crosstown

Davisville has Davisville station at 1900 Yonge Street, opened 30 March 1954 and accessible since 2002, plus St Clair and Eglinton. Davisville to Union is 10 stops on Line 1; Eglinton to Union is 11 stops. Surface routes at Davisville are 11 Bayview, 14 Glencairn, 28 Bayview South and 97 Yonge; at Mount Pleasant station they are 34 Eglinton, 74 Mount Pleasant, 103 Mount Pleasant North and the 334 Blue Night.

Leaside has no Line 1 or Line 2 station at all. Line 5 at Eglinton station is your transfer to Line 1, and Line 5 at Kennedy is your transfer to Line 2. Surface routes are 11 Bayview, 28 Bayview South into Davisville station, 51 Leslie, 88 South Leaside, 34 Eglinton and the 334. Neither neighbourhood has a GO station. Neither has expressway frontage: Davisville reaches the Don Valley Parkway via Bayview or Bloor Street East and the Allen via Eglinton Avenue West, while Leaside reaches the DVP via Millwood Road and Overlea Boulevard to the south or Eglinton Avenue East and Leslie Street to the east.

Leaside High School, and the ranking Davisville buyers misread

Fraser Institute figures below are data year 2023/24, and both the TDSB and the Ontario Public School Boards’ Association dispute the methodology — the TDSB publishes its own position and OPSBA has called the rankings a flawed picture. Read them as one input, not a verdict, and check the TDSB “Find Your School” tool by street address, because catchment is assigned by address and no one, including me, should tell you which school a given house attends.

Leaside. Leaside High School ranks 15 of 742 with a rating of 9.1, and its five-year figures are 15 and 8.8 — consistently top of the province, not a one-year spike. It opened in 1948. Bessborough Drive Elementary and Middle School ranks 32 with a 9.9; Northlea Elementary and Middle ranks 447 with a 7.8; Rolph Road Elementary ranks 532 with a 7.6.
Davisville. North Toronto Collegiate ranks 46 with an 8.4 and a five-year rank of 17 at 8.8; Northern Secondary ranks 65 with an 8.2 and is improving; Lawrence Park Collegiate, adjacent to the north, ranks 15 with a 9.1.
The number to ignore. Davisville Junior Public School shows a current rank of 1,426 and a rating of 6.2 against a five-year rank of 461 and rating of 7.5. The school was displaced by the site rebuild, which may well confound the data. Do not read that as a bad school and do not let anyone sell you a Davisville house on the strength of it either.
Not ranked is not badly ranked. Maurice Cody Junior PS, Hodgson Senior PS and Eglinton Junior PS do not appear in the current report at all. That means unranked, nothing more.

Where the school argument actually lands

Leaside High at rank 15 is the single strongest schooling case in midtown and it is genuinely priced in. But North Toronto CI at 46 and Northern at 65 are not far behind, and both sit on the Davisville side at roughly a million dollars less per detached house. The gap in schools is smaller than the gap in price.

What is genuinely wrong with each

Leaside

More than 3,400 residential units are proposed within a 300-metre radius of Bayview and Eglinton, now a Major Transit Station Area, in a neighbourhood whose tallest existing form is largely two to three storeys. Named proposals include 1802 Bayview at 419 units and 46 storeys, 589 Eglinton East at 442 units and 35 storeys, 2 Glazebrook at 434 units and 34 storeys, and Sunnybrook Plaza at 660 Eglinton East at 412 units in 16 and 12 storeys. One is already up: 1718 Bayview, “Leaside Common”, 197 units at nine storeys, under construction.
There is nowhere to downsize to. Six condo apartment sales and zero condo townhouse sales in Q1 2026. If you buy the house at 45 and want an elevator at 75, you will be leaving the neighbourhood to get one.
The stock is old. 66.9% of Leaside’s dwellings were built in 1960 or earlier. Budget for what that means in a Toronto house — the electrical panel, the supply lines, the drain lateral.
The planning rules for Laird Drive are not settled. Laird in Focus is the City study for the Laird and Eglinton East area, and unlike three other Focus Areas that advanced to Site and Area Specific Policies, Laird required additional study and public consultation. Nobody can tell you today what heights will be permitted there.

Davisville Village

The condo oversupply is measurable, not a vibe. Mount Pleasant West recorded 226 new condo listings against 89 sales in Q1 2026 — a 39% sales-to-new-listings ratio — at 40 days on market. You will have choice as a buyer and competition as a seller.
Construction is constant, and only part of it has an end date. The aquatic centre on the old Davisville Junior PS site is targeted at February 2027. The Davisville Avenue street redesign is still in consultation, and Yonge and Eglinton has been a live construction node for more than ten years.
Davisville Yard is the TTC’s main Line 1 maintenance yard and it is right at the station. It is the reason the Beltline Trail has to bridge over Yonge Street here rather than run through.
The tenure profile is not neutral. Four in five households in #173 North Toronto rent, on a 2020 median household income of $70,000. Districts that heavily rented are shaped by investor demand, and investor demand is the first thing to leave and the first thing to come back.

What gets built beside you

Leaside’s development fight is the defining local story of the next five years and it is concentrated at Bayview and Eglinton, plus the Eglinton East corridor: 1779 Bayview at 373 units and 35 storeys, 1840 Bayview at 377 and 34, 1837 Bayview at 288 and 25, 545 Eglinton East at 300 and 25, 586 Eglinton East at 249 and 32, 503 Eglinton East at 174 and 13. Whether you regard that as vandalism or as the point of building a subway line, you should know it is coming before you buy on Bayview.

Davisville’s biggest single project is civic rather than residential. The Davisville Community and Aquatic Centre is going up on the former Davisville Junior PS site east of Yonge and Davisville, jointly with a rebuilt TDSB school: three storeys, a six-lane 25-metre pool plus leisure and tot pools, a dance studio, a teaching kitchen and rooftop fitness. Groundbreaking was 12 November 2024 and completion is expected February 2027. The school gets pool access; the City gets the school’s double gym and parking garage outside school hours. Above that sits Midtown in Focus and the Ready, Set, Midtown programme, the City’s Yonge-Eglinton secondary plan and zoning review.

How I would actually decide

A family with a child heading into high school and $2.2M-plus. Leaside, and I would not spend long agonising. Rank 15 of 742, five-year rank 15, and a detached market that took 36 days in Q1 — you have time to inspect properly rather than waive conditions.
A family with the same brief and $1.5M. Mount Pleasant East. Twelve semis traded in Q1 2026 at an average of $1,523K and a median of $1,418K, with North Toronto CI and Northern nearby. You will pay a premium to list price — 106% — so budget above ask.
A first-time buyer or a single professional under $700,000. Davisville Village, on the west side. Eighty-nine condo apartments traded in Q1 at a $615,000 median, 226 came to market, and you can negotiate. Leaside has essentially no product for you.
An investor. Read the C10 benchmark carefully rather than the headline. Yes, the composite is up 2.56% while the city fell 3.73%. But the apartment benchmark is $597,900 and down 1.53%, and 226 new listings against 89 sales is not a landlord’s market. My honest read on both districts is in the monthly market report.
A downsizer already in Leaside. You will probably have to leave. Six condo sales in a quarter is not an option set. Davisville is ten stops from Union and eight minutes of Line 5 from your old street.

The uncomfortable part

Leaside is the better neighbourhood by almost every measure people care about — schools, ownership, house form, income. It is also the one whose benchmarks are falling hardest right now, six months after it got the transit everyone said it needed. Both of those things are true at the same time, and a buyer with a five-year horizon should be told both.

Common questions

Six months after the Crosstown opened, what happened to prices in Leaside?

They fell. Line 5 Eglinton opened on 8 February 2026 and gave Leaside two underground stations. In the August 2026 MLS Home Price Index, C11’s detached benchmark was $2,227,300, down 6.93% year over year, with attached down 8.43% and the composite down 3.11%. That is TRREB’s own index, not an opinion. Any claim that the LRT lifted Leaside values is currently contradicted by the data.

Why did C10’s benchmark rise while C11’s fell?

The two districts are made of different things. C10, which covers Davisville Village, is dominated by apartments, and its apartment benchmark held at $597,900, down only 1.53% against a city figure of −6.88%. That relative strength pulled the C10 composite to $929,600, up 2.56%. C11 is dominated by houses, and detached and attached benchmarks fell 6.93% and 8.43%. Houses corrected harder than midtown apartments this year.

Which is closer to downtown by transit, Davisville or Leaside?

Davisville, clearly. From Davisville station it is a single ride of 10 stops down Line 1 to Union, and 11 from Eglinton. Leaside has no Line 1 or Line 2 station at all — you ride Line 5 west to Eglinton station and transfer to Line 1 there, or east to Kennedy for Line 2. Neither neighbourhood has a GO station and neither has direct expressway frontage.

Can you buy a condo in Leaside?

Barely. The Leaside community recorded six condo apartment sales in Q1 2026, averaging $697,000 at a $718,000 median, and zero condo townhouse sales. City data says the same thing: 515 of 6,435 households are in buildings of five storeys or more. There is no practical downsizing-in-place option in Leaside today, which is one reason so many of the proposals at Bayview and Eglinton are apartment buildings.

If I want a detached house in the Davisville area, where do I actually look?

East of Mount Pleasant Road, in City neighbourhood #99 Mount Pleasant East. That is where the houses are: 29.9% single-detached, 22.0% semi-detached, 51.5% built before 1960. In Q1 2026 it recorded 13 detached sales averaging $2,125,000 at nine days on market. West of Mount Pleasant, City neighbourhood #173 North Toronto contains fifteen detached houses in total.

How many towers are proposed near Leaside station?

More than 3,400 residential units are proposed within a 300-metre radius of Bayview and Eglinton, which is now a Major Transit Station Area. Individual proposals include 46, 35, 34, 32 and 25-storey buildings, plus Sunnybrook Plaza at 660 Eglinton East at 16 and 12 storeys. The one already under construction is 1718 Bayview, Leaside Common, at 197 units and nine storeys. Existing built form nearby is largely two to three storeys.

Leaside House or Davisville Condo?

Send me the two addresses you are weighing and what your next five years look like. I will tell you what that Leaside block actually trades at, what the reserve fund and the competing listings look like in that Davisville building, and which one I would buy with my own money.

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.

Davisville Village vs Leaside: Did the Crosstown Change Anything?