Mattamy Homes CEO says pivot to prefab six-storey housing will help them through market downturn

“We’ve been doing a tremendous amount of consumer research, and we’ve really tried to get underneath what drives home ownership decisions in 2026,” Carr said, sitting in the company’s Mississauga office. 

Ontario is continuing to fight through a real estate downturn, with the GTA experiencing record-low sales for new homes and stalled building, leading to a significant projected supply shortage in 2029. To help spur more homebuilding, the federal and provincial governments recently announced a number of measures to stimulate sales and building in the new home sector with tax rebates and development charge reductions.

Carr believes these new policies will revive the sluggish market but emphasized it’s also up to developers to build housing that prospective homebuyers want at an achievable price tag.

The company’s mission, Carr said, is to continue building desirable products through the downturn by listening to what the consumer wants.

That boils down to building more missing middle housing — multi-unit, smaller buildings in typically residential neighbourhoods, the kind of three-bedroom apartments families are looking to buy, he said. 

There’s currently a glut of condo supply in Toronto but it’s shoebox units that no one wants to live in. Building bigger units isn’t as lucrative for developers as highrise towers with micro-units, which in part is why Toronto has seen more highrise construction than midrise density.

But for Mattamy Homes the main goal is to build more of all housing types from single-family homes to apartment units, especially as market conditions weaken.

“We want to build more houses. Our growth and our definition of success is to have more homes built, more workers employed and more careers created,” Carr said. “It’s all about volume.” 

Forging ahead on building large quantities of housing when presales are at record lows won’t be easy. 

While Mattamy Homes is a major developer in North America, operating in Alberta, Ontario and the U.S., they haven’t been immune to Ontario’s real estate struggles. 

Last year, the company and QuadReal cancelled the Clove condominium project, which was part of a massive redevelopment of Cloverdale mall in Etobicoke, after pre-selling below 10 per cent of available units. The development included a 33-storey tower with an adjoining nine-storey midrise, totalling over 600 units. Typically, developers need to pre-sell around 70 per cent of their units to secure financing. 

“We were very disappointed we had to cancel that project. It was a direct reaction to the market,” Carr said. 

“I believe we’ve seen a 90 per cent reduction from the 10-year average in terms of annual sales. It really is a moment where we need to reset in terms of what it looks like to bring those types of product to the market. We’re really in a moment when it’s time to reset.”

Last week, the company informed staff and customers that the Clockwork 4 project in Oakville (143 units and the fourth tower in the project) was cancelled due to low sales and financing conditions. The other three towers are not affected. 

To help boost the new build sector, Prime Minister Mark Carney and Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced a new $8.8-billion fund aimed at cutting municipal development charges by up to 50 per cent, after they expanded the HST rebate for purchasers of select new homes, which will reduce taxes and fees for a new home in Ontario by up to $200,000.

The recent moves from government are a boon for the new build industry, Carr said, and will make projects more affordable for builders and the consumer. 

The policies will offer Mattamy Homes the chance to “re-envision” the Clockwork 4 Project, with the company remaining optimistic it will build on this site in the coming years.

“We’re on the precipice of, I think, some real stabilization of our sector and hopefully a return to growth,” he said. 

To that end, he said Mattamy is focusing on bringing a new product to market: a six-storey building with more than 50 per cent being two- and three-bedroom apartments.

“It’s really trying to get affordable housing product in that six-storey format so we can deliver density but do it at a price that people can afford,” he said.

To get the price down, he said using prefabricated methods and innovative design will allow them to bring the buildings to the GTA at a large enough scale. 

Prefabricated homes are made in a factory and then assembled on-site — and experts say the process can be faster, cheaper and more sustainable than traditional home construction.

There’s two types of prefabricated homes. There’s 3D volume, in which the entire unit is constructed off-site and then assembled on-site like Lego. Then there’s panelized prefabricated, in which premade two-dimensional panels are put together on-site to make the three-dimensional unit.

Last year, Mattamy Homes’ founder Peter Gilgan announced a lofty goal to open a GTA-based factory in 2026 to pump out 3,000 prefabricated homes a year.

Carr said the factory is “well underway” with 470,000 square feet of manufacturing capacity being built in North Toronto, near Toronto Pearson International Airport. 

“We will be launching our first building in Mississauga,” Carr said, but will expand to Kitchener, Barrie, Oshawa and elsewhere in the GTA. Sales for the Mississauga building units will begin later this year with move-in dates in 2027.

The sales price of the units were not disclosed to the Star, as it will be determined closer to the sales launch based on market prices, material and labour costs, and fees.

Carr is confident that Mattamy Homes will continue to navigate a turbulent market, as the company has endured ups and downs in real estate for the last 48 years. 

“We’ve always come out of each downturn a little better prepared for the next run and how to better meet the needs of customers,” Carr said. 

“We learn in moments like this and we have aspirations to be here for another 48 years.”