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It’s not unusual to see half of a condo building’s units rented out by investors, and that continues to put downward pressure on rates. Toronto asking rents were $2,543 in June, down 1.9 per cent from a year ago, but they climbed 1.2 per cent from May, according to Rentals.ca.

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“It almost becomes a race to see who can put in a tenant as fast as possible, and it puts pressure on pricing,” Roebuck said. “We lease up in a much more organized fashion.”

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A bunch of subsidized units sprinkled throughout your building may be a sensitive topic, but will it really make it a different kind of building?

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“The affordable units are good working people and they end up in this sort of missing middle,” he said. “We are talking about people like hospital workers, police officers or what I would call essential workers. They just don’t have that negative connotation.”

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The other question is what High Art Capital is paying since it obviously has to get the best deal for its investors, so it’s probably not far from what developers would sell those units for anyway.

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“It’s letting the market find its true equilibrium in terms of pricing,” Roebuck said.

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Robert Hogue, assistant chief economist at Royal Bank of Canada, said pricing details will go a long way toward showing how the deal affects the market and that in the case of British Columbia, those have not yet emerged.

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“They would be bulk purchases,” he said, adding it implies there would be some kind of discount. “We can’t have a definite opinion until we see what is worked out and what type of tenants will be there. It’s still premature. But from the developer perspective, it takes some inventory off their hands and gives them capital back so they can develop some new things.”

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Not everyone is enthralled by the idea of government involvement in the market. Joshua Hunt, founder and chief executive of B.C.-based IGV Housing Ltd., which builds and finances housing, still supports letting the market run its course while creating better financing programs to let people enter the market.

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“If I buy something and now it’s full of affordable housing, it has just basically stolen my equity and devalued my asset,” he said, adding that without full details of the plan it’s hard to predict the impact. “The government here sees an opportunity and solution to a problem. The challenge is that, if executed poorly, it will create a bigger problem. Is it a developer bailout? They can say it’s a liquidation sale, but the problem is someone is being liquidated.”

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Hunt said a lot of the unsold condo housing in Vancouver is just product people don’t want, “and prices can just correct” based on demand for that product.

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“Why do you want to buy a whole bunch of housing stock that wasn’t even built for the way people want to live,” he said about the smaller unsold units that dominate the market. “You can’t just buy that stock and say this is the solution for how people want to live. Not many families want to live in a (450-square-foot unit).”

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Buying those units and forcing lower-income people into them will just destroy the equity of people who paid at the top of the market, he said.

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It’s all a bitter pill to swallow if you paid $1,200 to $1,600 per foot for your downtown Toronto condo, and these prices are now 30 per cent below that level, but the reality is that’s where the market is today.

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Nathan Adorjan, a broker of record at Re/Max Condo Plus, said you were already facing a new reality if you were trying to sell your condo.