Townhouses For Sale in Vaughan

A downtown built on top of a subway terminus

For most of its history Vaughan had no real centre. That changed in December 2017, when Line 1 of the TTC was extended north to Vaughan Metropolitan Centre station at Highway 7 and Jane Street. It was the first time the Toronto subway reached into York Region, and the land around the station has been changing ever since.

The city had planned for this area since a 1998 policy that set aside the old Vaughan Corporate Centre lands as a future business and residential core. Today the district, still called the Vaughan Corporate Centre in many listing systems, has finished condo towers, a bus terminal tied to the station by an underground corridor, and Viva rapid buses running down the middle of Highway 7.

What matters for a townhouse buyer is that the VMC is not only towers. Some of the larger blocks include rows of condo townhouses at their base or around their edges. One Menkes and QuadReal project alone was approved with several hundred townhouses alongside its apartment units. These are among the newest townhouses you can buy in the city, and they come with a subway stop within walking distance, which nothing else in Vaughan can say.

What's coming after the VMC

The subway was the first big piece. Several more are under way or planned, and they will shift which parts of Vaughan feel well connected over the next decade.

• Yonge North subway extension. Line 1's eastern branch is being extended north along Yonge Street, with stations planned at Steeles, Clark Avenue and a Bridge station near Highway 7 and the 407. The Thornhill side of Vaughan, including Uplands, sits along this corridor. The tunnelling contract was awarded in 2025, and the line is still years from opening.
• Highway 427. The extension north to Major Mackenzie Drive opened in September 2021, cutting drive times for Woodbridge, Vellore and Kleinburg. A further northward extension remains on provincial maps but has no firm timeline.
• Hospital and medical school. Cortellucci Vaughan Hospital opened in 2021 on Major Mackenzie Drive, north of Canada's Wonderland. A York University medical school is planned beside it.
• New community areas. North of Teston Road, the city has secondary plans for Block 27 and Block 41, two greenfield areas where the next round of freehold subdivisions, including townhouse rows, is planned. Block 27 has long been planned around a future Kirby GO station on the Barrie line.

None of these changes the house you buy, but they do change the street it sits on. A freehold town five minutes from a future subway entrance is a different long-term asset from one that depends on Highway 400 for everything.

Woodbridge first, Patterson last: the order Vaughan was built in

Vaughan grew fast and in a clear sequence, and the townhouse you find usually reflects when its corner of the city was built out.

Woodbridge was its own village until amalgamation in 1971, and its big postwar expansion began in the 1950s. Its condo townhouse complexes tend to be the oldest attached stock in the city, often low-rise and set back from Islington, Kipling or Highway 7.

Thornhill, on the Vaughan side of Yonge, urbanized from the 1960s on. Townhouses there are scattered, often in small condo developments near Yonge or Bathurst.

Maple started building subdivisions in the 1960s, expanded through the 1980s and 1990s, and reached Highway 400 and Teston Road by about 2000.

Vellore Village and Sonoma Heights came in the 1990s on the west side of the 400. Patterson, east of Dufferin, is mostly post-2001, which is why its freehold rows look so uniform. New Kleinburg, west of the old village, began in the early 2010s.

Between 1996 and 2006 Vaughan was the fastest-growing municipality in Ontario. That burst is the reason so much of the freehold townhouse stock is roughly the same age, and why many of those homes are now due for their first round of roofs, furnaces and windows.

Freehold rows, condo towns and stacked units

Vaughan's townhouse listings fall into three main groups, and each comes with different monthly costs and different questions to ask.

Freehold two- and three-storey rows make up most of the market in Patterson, Vellore, Maple and the newer parts of Kleinburg. You own the land and the structure, there is no condo corporation, and the only shared items are usually the party walls. Some newer rows are on a parcel of tied land (POTL), which carries a small monthly fee for a private road, snow clearing or shared landscaping.

Standard condo townhouses are more common in Woodbridge, Thornhill and along the major arterials. The corporation owns the exterior, roads and grounds, and the monthly fee pays for their upkeep and the reserve fund.

Stacked and back-to-back towns are newer, cluster around transit corridors and the VMC, and usually trade for well below a freehold row. You get condo-style living with your own front door, but you may lose a backyard, and parking is often underground.

The page above shows the current price spread by style, which is the quickest way to see how far apart these three groups are right now.

Barrie line, Line 1 and the 400

How you get to work matters more than almost anything else when you pick a Vaughan townhouse, because the city is wide and its transit runs on a few corridors.

• Line 1 subway from Vaughan Metropolitan Centre and Highway 407 stations, the only two subway stations in York Region. Viva Orange and Brampton's Züm 501 feed the VMC along Highway 7.
• GO Barrie line at Rutherford and Maple stations. Rutherford was rebuilt with a rail-over-road underpass, more parking and an improved bus loop, as part of Metrolinx's plan for more frequent two-way service on the line.
• Highways 400, 407 and 427. The 400 splits the city down the middle, the 407 runs across the south and the 427 now reaches Major Mackenzie.

In practice, buyers east of the 400 lean on Rutherford or Maple GO, buyers along Highway 7 lean on the subway, and buyers in Woodbridge and Kleinburg mostly drive. If you commute downtown every day, a short walk to one of these stations is worth weighing as heavily as square footage.

Before you firm up on a Vaughan townhouse

• Read the status certificate on any condo town. In Woodbridge's older complexes, look at the reserve fund study and whether roofs, windows or asphalt are due. A thin reserve can mean a special assessment.
• Confirm the tenure. Freehold, freehold with a POTL fee, standard condo and stacked condo can look alike in photos. The listing and the title should agree.
• Check parking and storage in stacked units. Many VMC and corridor stacked towns have one underground spot, and some have locker space sold separately.
• Look at the floodplain map near the Humber. Woodbridge, Vaughan Grove and parts of Kleinburg sit along Humber River branches. Hurricane Hazel flooded Woodbridge in 1954, and floodplain zoning followed.
• Ask what's planned next door. In the VMC and along Highway 7 and Yonge, a vacant lot or plaza beside you may already be zoned for a tower.

Vaughan's townhouse pockets side by side