Municipally Speaking

Toronto proper or the City of Toronto can be divided into many neighbourhoods. ( In the overall scheme of things, Toronto proper is only a small portion of the picture.
When you consider Metropolitan Toronto as a whole, there are several different municipalities that come under the heading of "Toronto".

Author's Aside: (What used to be the "burbs" 30 years ago are now considered part of the city . Some people are very defensive about where they live in Metropolitan Toronto);
When asked, do you live in Toronto? If the response is "No. I live in Don Mills or the Beaches or Parkdale.",
(Not being a Torontonian you would be totally lost.)

The municipalities are/(were):

Toronto, North York, Scarborough, East York, York, Etobicoke.

Now we have Toronto the "Mega City"   which has done away with all of the above names.  Some people who live in these former municipalities still refer to them.

The suburbs are now outside the bounds of  Toronto, namely:

To the West; Mississauga and Oakville.
To the North; Vaughan, Richmond Hill, Aurora, Newmarket, Markham-Unionville.
To the East; Pickering, Ajax , Whitby and Oshawa.

The Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB) has a Multiple Listing Service (MLS) that usually has between 23,000 and 30,000 active properties for sale at any given time throughout the year. (More later.)

Pick one house you say? It's your move isn't it?
If you are not sure, GET HELP!

(Back to Your Primer on Toronto)

With any neighbourhood, there are specific price ranges that of course vary from area to area. The fundamental problem with buying real estate is as most people know, LOCATION!...
Even driving from one end of a street to the other can have a dramatic effect on price and demographics. It can be difficult to explain to the novice that sometimes prices can be as much as 100 to 150% difference for similar homes on the same street (let alone in the same district.)
Some of the TREB districts are huge. They can be upwards to 25sqare miles or more and encompass 10 to 20 different and distinct neighbourhoods. (It would take me several years and hundreds of pages of text and images to give you as much of a perspective as I have on the city.)
At any rate, the city can be broken into a few sections to give you a simple primer on the types of housing that are available. The next section just deals with the three main areas of Toronto and some of the immediate Metro area. I will make a few comments as I go and hopefully I will add some serious insights to this site as we go along.

Rest assured, Toronto is still one of the most desirable, safest and cleanest cities in the world to live in.