Arista Homes

Arista Homes is a Southern Ontario homebuilder led by Founder and President Michael DeGasperis. It has built more than 11,000 homes, all within master-planned communities rather than scattered infill sites.

The company positions itself on award-winning communities, customer satisfaction and building healthy environments.

Low-rise family housing: single-detached homes and townhomes, delivered as whole master-planned communities across the Greater Toronto Area.

The consistency is itself informative. A builder with 11,000 homes all in master-planned communities has repeated the same discipline many times rather than moving between product types, and that tends to produce a predictable result.

It places Arista among the larger low-rise builders in Southern Ontario, though well below the very largest.

More usefully, it means there is a great deal of finished Arista product available to inspect. In a market where most of what you are shown is a rendering, being able to walk a ten year old street built by the same company is the most reliable research available.

Across the GTA, with communities in Vaughan, Kleinburg, Bradford, Vellore and other growing municipalities north and west of Toronto, including Union Glen and Vellore Trails.

These are suburban growth areas, so the usual trade applies: more house and more land for the money, at the cost of commute and of amenities that arrive after the homes do.

Go and see a completed Arista community that is at least five years old. With 11,000 homes built there will be one near you, and it will show you how the streetscape matured, how the landscaping was finished and how the homes have held up.

Ask which phase you are buying into and what is scheduled around you, since these are master-planned sites built out over years.

Then the usual: deposit schedule, lot premium, what is standard rather than an upgrade, grading and drainage, and the closing timeline.

Families buying space rather than access. Master-planned low-rise in the outer GTA means more square footage, a garage and a yard, at a price that would not buy a two bedroom condominium closer in.

The trade is time. These communities sit where land was available, which generally means a longer commute and amenities that arrive after the houses do.

If you want a house and you are willing to drive, this is the product. If you want to walk to a subway, it is not, and no amount of specification changes that.

That the whole neighbourhood was designed at once rather than assembled lot by lot: the street layout, the parks, the school sites, the stormwater ponds and the mix of home types are all planned together before the first house is built.

The advantage is coherence. Streets connect sensibly, greenspace is deliberate, and the community has a shape.

The thing to check is where you sit in the build-out sequence, because the finished plan you are shown may be a decade from existing.