Home sales in the Greater Toronto Area was up 28% last month compared to the same period last year. Latest figures from the Toronto Real Estate Board show almost 10,000 properties were sold last month. Prices averaged $395,414, up 6%.

In June, the GTA real estate market already showed an uptick but the latest numbers are making a stronger case that Toronto’s housing market may have finally started to recover from the prolonged slump that started in the fall of last year.

In June, Statistics Canada reported a 1.2% rise in building permits issued in the Toronto area – for a total $932 million worth of permits. That was up slightly from the $921 million total in May.

Housing prices in 11 of the 65 districts of the Toronto Real Estate Board were up for the first time in July after staying in the doldrums during the first six months of the year.

However, the total of 50,632 year-to-date home sales for the first seven months of this year is still down 1.2% from the same period in 2008, and prices from the first six months of this year were still down an average of 6% compared to the first six months of 2008.

A report released recently by RBC Economics noted that Toronto’s housing market “has entered a corrective phase,” and that, with low mortgage rates and prices slipping further, affordability should improve through the rest of the year.

RBC’s affordability measure for a detached bungalow in the Toronto area is 51.3% – compared to 70.3% in Vancouver and 39.4% in Montreal. This metric, which RBC has compiled since 1985, is based on the costs of owning a detached bungalow, generally considered a reasonable property benchmark for the housing market.