The Biggest Housing Bubble Is In Canada

I have heard them say bubble for years now, but no bubble in Canada. Prices are still very high even though it's slowed down significantly.

Massive bubble

No - prices still high and market is slow. It may be picking up now that the banks lowered the interest rate. Will be interesting to see what happens this spring. This is a resilient market.

I wish prices would come down. Seems like they are holding steady though. Still very expense in areas like Toronto and Vancouver.

I work in Canada for a mortgage/finance/realty corp and my boss is on one of the main property boards. There is not a bubble that will burst in Canada.

The first reason is that CMHC has always kept mortgage requirements quite tight and in line with our economy. This means that pretty much everybody who owns a house can afford to pay the mortgage, preventing widespread defaults like in the US.

Second is the widespread immigration. Sorry to tell you, but Vancouver and Toronto will never collapse because there is an infinite number of immigrants trying to get here. My cousin was just trying to buy a small condo downtown and he ended up renting because every condo would wnd up going for 30k more than asking due to demand.

Third is industry. Canadian companies are smart about putting HQers or plants in less populated areaa to not only save themselves money on the cost, but attract workers to cheap housing as well. If you look at Waterloo, prices 15 years ago were quite cheap as there wasn't much development there aside from the university. RIM put their HQ there, as well as some other companies, now prices have doubled.

I watched BC become China leading up to Hong Kong going back to red China. They could become landed immigrants for $1500Cdn back in the day where a USD became $1.55 Cdn.

They also took over North Toronto and built a seperate city out in the bull rush ponds.

This bust will be good for Canada and allow even more immigrants to land and slowly drive out Canadian culture, which is over rated.

Canada's #1 trading partner is USA total about 90% of Canada GDP. GM feeds Ontario- without America, Canada is just some panhandler standing on the corner.

If they were smart immigration would only be allowed into Quebec, plenty of room for Somalia to move in and not speak English OR French.

I wait for that bubble to burst everyday its still like 500,000 for bachlor condo downtown Toronto its a fuckin joke and there going up literally by the hundred. Plus the new mortgage rules to fuck my generation over.

Hmmm, I went into the bank last month and they approved me without me providing the last two months of payroll statements. I worked mega overtime since January so she used that amount. She actually was encouraging me to get approved for a higher amount. I told her I didn't want more because I couldn't make payments. I kid you not! I'm extremely surprised she did not want my payroll stubs for the last two months and I'm surprised how much they were willing to lend me. lol, yeah, I thought Canada was strict.
What the hell happened there? Not sure if it was because I had an excellent credit rating, but still you don't lend someone more than they can afford to make payments. Good thing I'm conservative or else I'm sure a lot of people would borrow more and get in over their head. I wonder how many of those people are out there and once the interest rates goes up, who knows what will happen. So really, we truly won't know for a few years how bad it is. Because once interest rates go up, we will see what will happen.

Andy by the way, you sound like a realtor.

Yeah, me too. My coworker, who owns a house, said she wishes the prices would come down. It's nice to hear that from someone who owns a home. Usually they are in favour of the prices staying high. She's a good person.

I don't know who would pay $500,000 for a shoe box? Same thing on the West Coast. Prices are very high. The advantage now is the serious buyers put their properties on the market for lower prices. You can get some good deals (well, kind of). Other buyers are just listing their properties and seeing if someone will pay it. Then no one buys it so they pull it off the market for a few months, then relist it. I've seen a lot of it. There is a really good website of someone tracking these properties.

This spring will be interesting for sure.