See if this makes sense to you.

Sales of new condos in Toronto have more or less fallen off a cliff, down 66.5 per cent in March compared to the same month a year earlier. So what did prices do? They soared by nearly 40 per cent during the same period.

That’s according to new data from the Building Industry and Land Development Association (BILD GTA), which reports that there were 1,649 new condos sold in Greater Toronto in March, down from 4,329 the same month a year earlier.

Keep in mind that last year at this time, Toronto’s housing market was at the peak of its frenzy, making the comparison to this year look that much worse. But sales in March were still about 21 per cent lower than their long-run average. BILD called it “a quiet month” for the market.

But it wasn’t quiet on the pricing side. The benchmark price for a condo sold in Toronto was $742,801 in March, up 39.7 per cent in a year. Part of the increase comes from the fact larger condos are being used to measure the benchmark price (900 square feet, up from 800 square feet a year ago). But the price per square foot also increased, to $825 from $666 last year.

So what gives? How can prices keep soaring even when sales are way down?

By and large, the industry says Toronto — like the other super-pricey city in Canada, Vancouver — is facing a supply shortage at the same time that buyers have seen their purchasing power reduced, thanks to new housing and mortgage rules.

“Recent changes to mortgage regulations are fuelling demand for lower priced homes while shrinking the pool of qualified buyers for higher-priced homes,” said Gregory Klump, chief economist at the Canadian Real Estate Association, in a report earlier this month.

“Given their limited supply, the shift of demand into lower price segments is causing those sale prices to climb. As a result, ‘affordably priced’ homes are becoming less affordable while mortgage financing for higher priced homes remains out of reach of many aspiring move-up homebuyers.”

BILD president and CEO David Wilkes echoes the argument of many in Toronto’s real estate sector, saying that restrictions on development are preventing housing supply from coming online.

“If we want to see more housing that people can afford, we need to address this region’s housing supply problem,” Wilkes said in a statement.

“And for that to happen, we will all need to work together to remove barriers to development, which include outdated zoning that doesn’t support intensification, miles of government red tape, and lack of critical infrastructure.”

Supply is actually increasing…

But is there really such a huge supply shortage right now, one that justifies a 40-per-cent price hike? There’s no doubt that the number of single-family homes being built in the GTA has been dropping for years. But the supply of condos is actually on the rise this year.

Thanks to that, there were 12,457 new housing units available for sale in the GTA in March, up 22.7 per cent from the same month a year earlier. Still, to put that in perspective, that’s well down from the more than 20,000 units available two years ago.

So it may not entirely be a supply issue; it may also be that some buyers simply haven’t gotten the memo about the new reality of Toronto’s slowing housing market, and are still willing to pay big premiums for a property.

But if this soft patch continues, more buyers are likely to come to the conclusion that now is a good time to wait and see if prices will come down.

“The cumulative effects of government measures to cool the housing market are likely keeping many potential buyers out of the housing market,” Wilkes said. “Many may simply be taking a wait-and-see approach.”

With the market giving such contradictory signals, is it any wonder buyers want to sit this one out?

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story stated that the average price of a new condo sold in Toronto was $742,801 in March. That is, in fact, the benchmark price.

This seems to be the year of the condo in Canadian real estate — even, it would seem, at the very top end of the market.

According to listings data compiled by Point2 Homes, the most expensive residential property for sale in Canada right now is a $38-million penthouse condo overlooking the city skyline and mountains.

It’s a whopper of a property, sitting atop the Fairmont Pacific Hotel and occupying 6,700 square feet of living space — not including the 2,900 square feet of outdoor deck space. Truly, a deserving home for a young student with wealthy parents for a wealthy buyer. (More pics below.)

But if a condo is Canada’s most expensive listing these days, that might also have to do with the rapid slowdown in the luxury housing market in Canada recently.

“Although these staggering prices remain prohibitive for most people, compared to last year’s figures, the values for the most expensive homes … have toned down significantly,” Point2 Homes says on its blog. It noted that the most expensive home listed in Canada last year was Belmont Estate on Vancouver’s west side, with an asking price of $63 million.

Watch: How much home can “peak millennials” afford in Canada? (Story continues below)

Sales of luxury homes in Toronto fell by nearly 68 per cent in the first quarter of this year, Royal LePage reported earlier this month. Sales were down 38 per cent in Vancouver during the same period.

“Overall, sales activity declined in Greater Vancouver and the GTA luxury real estate market as both sellers and buyers adjusted to federal and provincial measures affecting both domestic and foreign buyers,” the report said.

But the condo market seems to be holding up more strongly these days, as buyers shift attention to the more affordably-priced segment of the housing market. Yet as these listings show, condos can be as pricey as single-family homes, even in the luxury market.

And at the end of the day, this list shows you’re still nowhere near owning one of Canada’s priciest properties. But you can certainly look. Here are the five most expensive properties for sale in Canada today. They are, without exception and not surprisingly, all in Toronto and Vancouver.

5: A veritable palace in Vancouver’s Shaugnessy Heights: $29.98 million

Vancouver’s Shaugnessy is one of Canada’s ritziest neighbourhoods, a leafy paradise of sprawling mansions just south of the downtown core.

Even by Shaugnessy standards, this three-story house is big — six bedrooms and six baths on more than 12,000 square feet of living space. The property features a “stunning two-story foyer,” according to the listing realtor, as well as a home theatre with a curved projection screen and a “700-bottle climate-controlled wine cellar” for when you’re having a few friends over.

4. A two-story penthouse in Toronto’s Yorkville neighbourhood: $31.5 million

It’s not often you can find a house in Toronto’s inner city that gives you the sort of space you’d get in the country, but if you have $31.5 million, or can somehow get a mortgage for that much, you can make it happen.

Recently featured in the New York Times, this condo in the heart of Toronto’s upscale Yorkville neighbourhood features 10,200 square feet of living space on two storeys, and some 5,000 square feet of terraces. Besides four bedrooms and six full baths, there’s also a two-storey foyer, a library and a gym. And the views are striking.

3. A mansion in Vancouver’s inner city, with a fantastic pool: $34.8 million

Another property located in Vancouver’s Shaugnessy area, this half-acre property features six bedrooms and seven full baths on more than 11,000 square feet of living space.

There’s a wine cellar large enough for 1,200 bottles, a billiard room and a “state of the art media room,” but it’s the outdoor features that really grab attention here: A stunning heated infinity pool, complete with an outdoor kitchen and pizza oven, a poolside dining area and a cabana. In the summer months, you might never step inside.

2. A behemoth in Toronto’s Bridle Path: $35 million

When it was listed for sale in 2014, 68 The Bridle Path, in the ritzy Toronto inner suburb of the same name, was asking $25 million. It’s now listed for $35 million. (At these price levels it’s all sort of abstract, isn’t it?)

The property was built in the early 1980s by real estate developer Robert Campeau, and its guests over the years have included Pierre Trudeau and Jane Fonda. It has been used as a set for TV shows as well.

The house features 10 bedrooms and 14 bathrooms, numerous fireplaces and a sizeable indoor pool. At 28,000 square feet, it’s the largest, by living space, of the properties on this top-five list.

1. A penthouse condo in Vancouver’s Coal Harbour: $38 million

Penthouse Two atop the Fairmont Pacific Rim Hotel, overlooking Vancouver’s harbour, has 6,700 square feet of living space, or about one-quarter as much as the second-most expensive property for sale in Canada, the above-mentioned Bridle Path behemoth.

But this is Vancouver, and space is tight. This property still features four bedrooms and four full baths, along with amenities like a gym and a pool with hot tub. But it’s the views around Vancouver and the mountains that surely take the cake as the most eye-catching feature.

VIDEO

HONG KONG — The U.S. clothing retailer Gap apologized Tuesday for selling T-shirts with what it says is an incorrect map of China that didn’t include self-ruled Taiwan, in the latest example of corporate kowtowing to Beijing.

“Upon the realization that one of our T-shirts sold in some overseas markets mistakenly failed to reflect the correct map of China, we urgently launched an internal investigation across the group and have decided to immediately pull back this T-shirt from all the concerned global markets,” the company said in a statement, adding that the shirts had already been pulled from Chinese shelves and destroyed.

The company took action after photos began circulating on Chinese social media of a T-shirt showing a map that didn’t include Taiwan, a self-ruled island that Beijing regards as Chinese territory. The map also appeared to leave out southern Tibet and the disputed South China Sea, the state-owned Global Times said, adding that it drew hundreds of complaints on China’s Weibo microblogging platform.

The photos were taken at a Gap shop in Canada’s Niagara region, Global Times said. The shirt could not be found on Gap websites and it wasn’t clear whether it was still being sold in shops in some countries.

“We sincerely apologize for this unintentional error,” said the company, which issued the statement through its public relations firm APCO after making a similar apology late Monday on its Weibo account.

Gap promised to carry out “more rigorous reviews” to prevent similar incidents and said it respected China’s
“sovereignty and territorial integrity” and strictly followed the country’s laws and rules.

China noted Gap’s apology and “will follow carefully their actions and remarks later on,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said at a daily briefing in Beijing.

Latest company to apologize to China

Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu told reporters that China pressuring companies like Gap to change how they refer to Taiwan was “rather unfortunate in terms of cross-strait relations” and would push its residents “further and further away” rather than winning their “hearts and minds.”

Gap is the latest of several companies that have apologized for perceived slights to China’s sovereignty.

Delta Air Lines, hotel operator Marriott and fashion brand Zara are among businesses that have apologized to China for referring to Taiwan Hong Kong, and Tibet as countries on websites or promotional material. Mercedes-Benz said sorry for quoting the Dalai Lama on social media. The Tibetan spiritual leader is reviled by Beijing.

The U.S. has started pushing back against Beijing, with the White House condemning China’s efforts to control how U.S. airlines refer to Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau as “Orwellian nonsense.”

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AP researcher Liu Zheng in Beijing and videojournalist Johnson Lai in Taipei, Taiwan contributed to this report.

Also On HuffPost:

The luxury housing markets in Toronto and Vancouver are undergoing a major slowdown, with sales plummeting from year-ago levels and once-rapidly-rising prices now under pressure, according to new reports released this week.

And a recovery within the next year looks unlikely.

Sales of luxury homes in the Greater Toronto Area fell by nearly 68 per cent in the first quarter of this year, compared to the same period a year earlier, realtor Royal LePage reported on Thursday.

Watch: The best places in Canada to buy real estate, according to MoneySense

In Vancouver, sales were down 38.2 per cent from a year earlier, the report said.

The luxury condo market fared only slightly better, with sales down 28.2 per cent in Toronto and 26.5 per cent in Vancouver.

Royal LePage defines “luxury” housing as any home that costs more than three times the median house price in a given city. For Toronto, the threshold is $3.046 million, and in Greater Vancouver, it’s $4.63 million.

“Overall, sales activity declined in Greater Vancouver and the GTA luxury real estate market as both sellers and buyers adjusted to federal and provincial measures affecting both domestic and foreign buyers,” the report said.

The new mortgage rules introduced by Canada’s federal banking regulator at the start of the year “created market turmoil as buyers moved to the sidelines in order to gauge the impact on luxury home prices,” it added.

Those falling sales are putting downward pressure on luxury house prices, which fell 0.2 per cent from a year earlier in Toronto, though condo prices still rose 10.4 per cent.

Luxury house prices still managed to eke out a 5.2-per-cent gain, year on year, in Greater Vancouver.

“The price appreciation that we are witnessing in Greater Vancouver’s luxury market this spring is largely a result of momentum being carried over from 2017,” Royal LePage President Phil Soper stated in the report.

But Soper doesn’t see that continuing. Royal LePage forecasts luxury house prices in Greater Vancouver will fall by three per cent over the next year. In Toronto, it sees prices flat for the coming year.

“Contrary to popular belief, wealthy homebuyers are price sensitive too,” Soper said. “They didn’t reach the point in their lives where they have the capacity to acquire high-value real estate without being financially astute.”

Plunging in the global rankings

With their markets in “turmoil,” as Royal LePage put it, the days of Toronto and Vancouver riding high in the rankings of luxury real estate appear to be definitively over.

In the past year, both cities have steadily plunged in the Knight Frank Prime Global Cities Index, which measures the state of the top five per cent of housing markets in more than 40 major cities around the world.

Vancouver is in 31st place in the rankings for the first quarter of the year, down from 10th in the first quarter of 2017. Toronto is in 18th place, down from third. It’s a clear sign that, relative to other luxury housing markets, Toronto and Vancouver are losing steam.

LONDON (Reuters) – A Cambridge Analytica whistleblower said on Tuesday that Canadian company AggregateIQ worked on software called Ripon which was used to identify Republican voters ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

AggregateIQ did not immediately respond to request for comment on the remarks by Christopher Wylie, a whistleblower formerly of British political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.

Wylie has previously disclosed how users’ data from Facebook was used by Cambridge Analytica to help elect U.S. President Donald Trump.

Ripon, the town in which the Republican Party was founded in 1854, was the name given to a tool that let a campaign manage its voter database, target specific voters, conduct canvassing, manage fundraising and carry out surveys.

“There’s now tangible proof in the public domain that AIQ actually built Ripon, which is the software that utilised the algorithms from the Facebook data,” Wylie told the British Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee.

AggregateIQ told Reuters on March 24 that it had never been and is not a part of Cambridge Analytica nor ever entered into a contract with Cambridge Analytica.

It said it works in full compliance within all legal and regulatory requirements and had never knowingly been involved in any illegal activity.

Cambridge Analytica said on Tuesday that it had not shared any of the Facebook profile data procured by a Cambridge academic with AggregateIQ. It said it had not had any communication with AggregateIQ since December 2015.

(Reporting by Alistair Smout, Andy Bruce and Eric Auchard, editing by Guy Faulconbridge)