Davisville Village vs Willowdale: Which Condo Wins?

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

Both are apartment districts strung along Line 1, and the honest answer depends on whether you are buying to live in or to hold. Davisville Village is ten stops from Union and sits in TRREB district C10, whose composite benchmark reached $929,600 in August 2026, up 2.56% year over year — the only rising district benchmark in midtown or north Toronto, against a city-wide fall of 3.73%. Willowdale is 14 to 16 stops out, with more space, more parking and cheaper entry — and its C14 apartment benchmark fell to $558,700, down 10.12%, the steepest single-segment decline in midtown and north Toronto. Same subway, opposite trajectories.

Same subway line, opposite results

I get this comparison from buyers with a fixed budget and a flexible postcode: roughly $600,000, a one-bedroom or a small two, and a preference for not driving. Davisville and Willowdale both answer that brief. Both are dominated by apartment towers. Both sit directly on Line 1. And in the year to August 2026 they did entirely different things.

TRREB’s Home Price Index for August 2026 puts the C10 composite at $929,600, up 2.56%, with the C10 apartment benchmark at $597,900, down just 1.53% against a city apartment figure of −6.88%. Willowdale straddles two districts. East of Yonge is C14, whose composite was $893,500, down 3.61%, and whose apartment benchmark was $558,700, down 10.12%. West of Yonge is C07, composite $1,002,300, down 3.67%, apartment $623,800, down 5.46%. If you bought an apartment in either district a year ago, the index says one of you is roughly flat and the other is down a tenth.

One line before the detail

C10 apartments fell 1.53% and C14 apartments fell 10.12% in the same twelve months, in the same city, on the same subway line. Distance from Union is doing more work in that gap than anything a floor plan can fix.

Neither of these is a single neighbourhood

Willowdale is not one MLS unit. C14 covers Willowdale East plus Newtonbrook East; C07 covers Willowdale West plus Lansing-Westgate, Newtonbrook West and Westminster-Branson. Yonge Street is the dividing spine — east is C14, west is C07 — which means two condos facing each other across Yonge report into different districts with different benchmarks. On the City side, the legacy neighbourhood #51 Willowdale East was split in April 2022 into #151 Yonge-Doris, #152 East Willowdale and #153 Avondale; #37 Willowdale West was left alone.

Davisville has its own version of the same problem, running the other way. On MLS it is a single district, C10, holding the communities Mount Pleasant West and Mount Pleasant East. On the City map it is two units where there was one: the April 2022 restructure divided legacy #104 Mount Pleasant West into #173 North Toronto and #174 South Eglinton-Davisville, and a good many portals never updated. Ask which unit a Davisville statistic refers to before you rely on it.

CHECK WHICH SIDE OF YONGE YOU ARE ONIn Willowdale the district boundary runs down the middle of Yonge Street. C14’s apartment benchmark fell 10.12% in the year to August 2026; C07’s fell 5.46%. If a listing quotes district statistics, confirm whether the building is east or west of Yonge before you treat those numbers as yours.

The two condo districts most alike on paper

The census profiles are almost comically similar. City neighbourhood #151 Yonge-Doris — the Yonge, Sheppard and Finch condo core — holds 9,845 households, of which 9,090 (92.3%) are apartments in buildings of five storeys or more. It contains 20 single-detached houses and no semi-detached houses at all. Only 105 households live in anything built before 1960; the bulk went up between 1991 and 2010. The 2020 median household income was $73,000 and owner-occupancy is 55.6%.

City neighbourhood #173 North Toronto, on the Davisville side, holds 9,430 households, 8,475 of them (89.9%) in five-plus-storey apartments, and contains fifteen single-detached houses in the entire neighbourhood. Tenure runs 81.4% renter, the 2020 median household income was $70,000, and 2,915 households — nearly a third — live in stock built between 2016 and 2021. Its neighbour #174 South Eglinton-Davisville is 85.7% five-plus-storey apartments across 13,185 households, 69.6% renter, median income $80,000.

The difference is age and tenure. Yonge-Doris is a 1990s and 2000s condo district that people largely bought to live in; North Toronto is a newer, far more rented district where four out of five households are tenants. That matters for how each behaves in a downturn, and it is the single most useful thing to know before you compare unit prices.

What the sales actually show

Community-level figures are Q1 2026 (January to March), the most recent quarter TRREB publishes at that geography and therefore about six months old as I write. District figures are August 2026. Sale counts are in the table.

	Davisville area (C10)	Willowdale East (C14)	Willowdale West (C07)
Condo apartment, Q1 2026	Mount Pleasant West: 89 sales, avg $632K, median $615K	78 sales, avg $625K, median $595K	30 sales, avg $598K, median $580K
Days on market	40	40	42
Sale-to-list	97%	98%	96%
New condo listings in the quarter	226 — a 39% sales-to-new-listings ratio	321 — a 24% sales-to-new-listings ratio	not separately published
Detached, Q1 2026	Mount Pleasant East: 13 sales, avg $2,125K, 9 days	24 sales, avg $1,998K, median $1,684K, 34 days, 94%	13 sales, avg $1,975K, median $2,170K, 32 days, 98%
Apartment benchmark, Aug 2026	$597,900, down 1.53%	$558,700, down 10.12%	$623,800, down 5.46%
Composite benchmark, Aug 2026	$929,600, up 2.56%	$893,500, down 3.61%	$1,002,300, down 3.67%

Read the fourth row before anything else. In Q1 2026 Willowdale East absorbed 78 condo sales against 321 new listings — a 24% sales-to-new-listings ratio. Mount Pleasant West absorbed 89 against 226, a 39% ratio. Both are buyers’ markets. One is roughly half again as deep as the other. And at district level in August 2026, C14 was carrying 380 active listings and 5.7 months of inventory against 4.6 city-wide, while C10 carried 199 active and 3.8 months.

Where the leverage is

If you are buying, Willowdale gives you more choice and more room to negotiate — five and a half months of inventory does that. If you are selling in the next two years, that same number is the problem. The buyer’s advantage in Willowdale and the seller’s disadvantage are the same statistic read from two ends.

Counting stops, not minutes

I do not publish minute-based commute times, because neither the TTC nor Metrolinx puts station-to-station scheduled times in a form worth quoting. Stop counts are verifiable, so use those instead. From Davisville station it is 10 stops down Line 1 to Union, and 11 from Eglinton. From Willowdale it is 14 stops from Sheppard-Yonge and 16 from Finch — the longest ride of any neighbourhood I write about.

Willowdale’s compensation is that it is a hub rather than a stop. Line 1 serves Finch (the northern terminus), North York Centre, Sheppard-Yonge and York Mills, and Line 4 Sheppard runs east from Sheppard-Yonge to Don Mills. The surface network at Sheppard-Yonge is large: 84 Sheppard West and its branches, the 984A express, 98C Willowdale-Senlac, 185 Sheppard Central, 97A and 97B Yonge, and the 320, 384 and 385 Blue Night routes. Highway 401 forms the south-east boundary with interchanges at Yonge and at Avenue Road and Bathurst; the 404 and DVP are to the east. There is no GO station on Yonge in Willowdale.

Davisville’s transit is narrower but closer in. Davisville station at 1900 Yonge Street opened on 30 March 1954 and has been accessible since 2002; buses there are 11 Bayview, 14 Glencairn, 28 Bayview South and 97 Yonge. Line 5 Eglinton opened on 8 February 2026, adding the Eglinton interchange and Mount Pleasant station at Mount Pleasant Road and Eglinton. There is no GO station and no expressway frontage — the DVP comes via Bayview or Bloor Street East, the Allen via Eglinton Avenue West.

The Yonge North Subway Extension is the thing Willowdale buyers ask me about. It is real and under construction: 6.3 kilometres north from Finch with five stations at Steeles, Clark Avenue, Royal Orchard Boulevard, Bridge and High Tech. A $1.4 billion tunnelling contract went to North End Connectors in August 2025 and a stations, rails and systems package worth roughly $4 billion went out for qualifications that October, with preliminary works at Finch station begun in February 2023. There is no confirmed opening date. I would not price it into an offer.

Schools: a rank of 1 and a rank of 401 in the same neighbourhood

Fraser Institute figures are data year 2023/24, and the TDSB and the Ontario Public School Boards’ Association both dispute the methodology. Treat them as one input. Catchment is assigned by street address, so check the TDSB “Find Your School” tool rather than any agent’s map, mine included.

Willowdale’s secondary spread is the widest anywhere on Line 1. Earl Haig Secondary School ranks 23 of 742 with a rating of 8.9. Newtonbrook Secondary ranks 401 with a 5.9, though it is improving sharply from a five-year rank of 539. A Y Jackson also ranks 23 at 8.9, William Lyon Mackenzie 33 at 8.7, Georges Vanier 275 at 6.7. Cardinal Carter Academy for the Arts, a Catholic school, ranks 8 with a 9.3.
Willowdale elementary. Avondale Alternative ranks 1 of 3,047 with a rating of 10.0; Avondale PS ranks 702 with a 7.3. Hollywood, McKee, Cummer Valley, Yorkview, Churchill and Finch are not ranked in the current report, which means unranked, not poor.
Davisville secondary. 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, just north, ranks 15 with a 9.1.
Davisville elementary, carefully. Davisville Junior PS currently sits at rank 1,426 with a 6.2, well below its five-year rank of 461 and rating of 7.5 — and the school spent that period displaced by its own site rebuild, which may well be doing the work in that number. Maurice Cody, Hodgson Senior and Eglinton Junior do not appear in the report at all.

The practical point in Willowdale is that the catchment line between Earl Haig and Newtonbrook is worth six figures, and it is drawn by address. That is a real financial variable, not a preference. In Davisville the secondary options are tighter together and the elementary picture is genuinely hard to read because of the rebuild.

What each place will cost you in patience

Willowdale

The apartment benchmark fell 10.12%. That is the steepest single-segment decline in the city’s midtown and north districts, against a city figure of −6.88%. Meanwhile C14 townhouses fell 0.53% and detached 2.02% — the correction is concentrated almost entirely in apartments, which is exactly the product most Willowdale buyers are shopping for.
Supply is deep and getting deeper. 380 active listings and 5.7 months of inventory in C14 in August 2026, against 4.6 city-wide, at 96% of list in 38 days.
The commute is the longest in this series. Fourteen stops from Sheppard-Yonge, sixteen from Finch, and no GO station on Yonge to shortcut it.
The rules are not written yet. The governing Secondary Plan dates to 1997 and covers an area now holding over 50,000 residents and 35,000 employees. The North York at the Centre Directions Report went to the Planning and Housing Committee on 26 February 2026 and Council adopted it with amendments on 25 and 26 March 2026, with staff to report back in Q1 2027 with recommended Official Plan Amendments and urban design guidelines. Anyone buying near Yonge on the expectation of a specific height permission is buying ahead of the rules.

Davisville Village

226 new condo listings against 89 sales in one quarter. A rising composite benchmark is not the same as a seller’s market for apartments. What it records is an apartment segment that gave up less ground than everyone else’s.
Construction with a date, and construction without one. The aquatic centre on the old Davisville Junior PS site has a February 2027 target. The Davisville Avenue redesign consultation and the Yonge and Eglinton node, a working site for over a decade, do not.
Davisville Yard. The TTC’s main Line 1 maintenance yard sits right at the station — the reason the Beltline Trail has to bridge over Yonge Street here.
Two neighbourhoods, one name. Buyers who say “Davisville” often picture the leafy east side and get shown a tower on Yonge, or the reverse. Decide which one you actually want before you start booking showings.

What each place has that the other does not

Willowdale has civic infrastructure at a scale midtown does not match: Mel Lastman Square, the North York Civic Centre, the Toronto Centre for the Arts, the North York Central Library, and Empress Walk, a condominium and retail complex with a Cineplex IMAX built into North York Centre station. It also has the densest Korean, Chinese and Persian retail strip in the city along Yonge from Sheppard to Finch, which follows from a population that is roughly 70% immigrants, with the largest groups Chinese at 22%, Korean at 9.35% and Iranian at 8.77%. Gibson House Museum at 5172 Yonge Street is an 1851 Georgian Revival farmhouse built by David Gibson, the surveyor exiled after the 1837 rebellion. York Cemetery opened in 1948.

Davisville has the Kay Gardner Beltline Park, built on the Toronto Belt Line Railway of 1892, with the City buying the eastern right-of-way from CN in 1972 and naming it for councillor Kay Gardner in 1999 and 2000. It crosses a bridge over Yonge Street and the Davisville Subway Yard and runs on through Mount Pleasant Cemetery. Retail runs along Yonge from Davisville to Eglinton, the Mount Pleasant Village BIA on Mount Pleasant Road, Bayview Avenue to the east and the Yonge-Eglinton Centre node. And from February 2026 it has Line 5, including Mount Pleasant station, which reuses the catalogued, brick-by-brick-disassembled facade of the 1928 Imperial Bank of Canada building.

Who I would send where

Buying to live in, downtown job, budget around $600K. Davisville. Ten stops to Union and a district benchmark that has held up better than anywhere else in midtown or north Toronto.
Buying to live in, job in North York or along the 401. Willowdale, and use the depth of the market. 380 active listings and 5.7 months of inventory is the strongest negotiating position a Toronto condo buyer has had in years.
Buying to hold and rent. Be honest with yourself about both. C14 apartments fell 10.12% year over year and C10’s absorbed 226 new listings against 89 sales in a quarter. If the plan depends on appreciation in the next 24 months, neither district is currently arguing your case. Run the actual numbers first — my notes on the districts are in the monthly market report.
A family that wants a house on the subway. Willowdale, without much hesitation. City neighbourhood #152 East Willowdale is 52.9% single-detached with 69.8% ownership, and 24 detached houses traded in Willowdale East in Q1 2026 at a $1,684,000 median. On the Davisville side, the houses are all east of Mount Pleasant Road and traded at a $2,100,000 median.
Anyone counting on a subway extension. Do not. The Yonge North Subway Extension is under construction with no confirmed opening date. Buy the building you would be content with if it never opened.

If you already own in either district and want a straight read rather than a listing pitch, the condo value estimator will get you into the right range, and I will tell you where it is wrong for your specific building.

Common questions

Which has the shorter subway ride downtown, Davisville or Willowdale?

On stop count, Davisville. It is a single ride of 10 stops down Line 1 to Union, and 11 from Eglinton. Willowdale is 14 stops from Sheppard-Yonge and 16 from Finch, the longest in this series, with no GO station on Yonge to shorten it and an extension that runs north from Finch rather than south. Willowdale’s compensation is space, parking and price, not proximity.

Why did Willowdale apartments fall 10.12% when Davisville apartments fell 1.53%?

They are different markets with different supply. Willowdale East absorbed 78 condo sales against 321 new listings in Q1 2026, a 24% ratio, and C14 was carrying 5.7 months of inventory by August against 4.6 city-wide. Mount Pleasant West absorbed 89 against 226, a 39% ratio, in a district that is ten stops from Union. Deeper supply further from the core corrected harder.

Is Willowdale a buyer’s market right now?

On TRREB’s own numbers, yes. In August 2026 C14 recorded 380 active listings, 5.7 months of inventory against a city-wide 4.6, sales at 96% of list and 38 average days on market; C07 showed 317 active and 5.8 months at 94% of list. Buyers have choice and negotiating room. Sellers in the same district are looking at the same statistic from the wrong end.

Are there detached houses in Davisville Village or Willowdale?

In both, but not where people expect. City neighbourhood #173 North Toronto contains fifteen single-detached houses in total; the Davisville-area houses are east of Mount Pleasant Road in City neighbourhood #99 Mount Pleasant East. In Willowdale, #151 Yonge-Doris contains 20 detached houses, but #152 East Willowdale is 52.9% single-detached and #37 Willowdale West is 26.0%.

Should I buy in Willowdale because of the Yonge North Subway Extension?

Not on its own. The extension is genuinely under construction — 6.3 kilometres north from Finch with five stations, a $1.4 billion tunnelling contract awarded in August 2025 — but there is no confirmed opening date, and it runs north of Finch rather than shortening the ride to Union. The nearest comparable case is instructive: Line 5 Eglinton opened in February 2026 and the district it serves in Leaside still saw its detached benchmark fall 6.93%.

Which Willowdale schools rank well in the Fraser report?

Earl Haig Secondary ranks 23 of 742 with a rating of 8.9, A Y Jackson also 23 at 8.9, William Lyon Mackenzie 33 at 8.7 and Cardinal Carter Academy for the Arts 8 at 9.3. Avondale Alternative ranks 1 of 3,047 elementary schools at 10.0. Newtonbrook Secondary ranks 401 at 5.9. The figures are data year 2023/24 and the TDSB and OPSBA dispute the methodology.

Midtown Condo or North York Condo?

Send me the two buildings you are choosing between and how you actually get to work. I will tell you what has traded in each of them this year, how deep the competing supply is in that specific tower, and which one I would put my own deposit on.

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 Willowdale: Which Line 1 Condo Wins?