David Larock in Mortgages and Finance
I have always enjoyed challenging widely held beliefs, probably because so many of them fall apart upon closer examination. Most recently, my contrarian radar started going off in the summer as talk of a Canadian housing bubble increased from a simmer to a boil. One of the most common justifications used in the argument that our house prices are due for a
Over the past thirty years, increases in Canadian mortgage rates have not tended to trigger a decrease in houses prices. In fact, more often than not the reverse is true. Before I get into the numbers, let me start by citing my sources. I took the average five-year residential mortgage lending rate (from Statistics Canada) and compared it to the average selling price of a Canadian home (provided in a report by the Canadian Real Estate Association), on a month-by-month basis from January, 1980, up to June, 2010. I used the five-year fixed-mortgage rate because it is by far the most common term chosen by Canadians, and I went back to 1980 because that was as far back as the CREA stats went. The only tweak I made to the data was to compare interest rate changes to house prices two months hence, because I reasoned that higher rates would immediately impact offers to purchase, which take about two months to become transactions. Here is what I found:
Over this period, totaling 365 months, there were 156 instances where the five-year residential mortgage rate increased over the prior month, and in 97 of these cases, house prices increased two months later. That means that
So how do we explain this counter-intuitive result? Well for starters, interest rates and house prices do not exist in a vacuum and both are influenced by the overall strength or weakness of our broader economy. Rising interest rates generally occur in a healthy economic environment where future price inflation is expected, making them a by-product of positive economic momentum. While it certainly is true that higher rates increase borrowing costs, this generally happens in periods with rising incomes, higher levels of employment and increasing consumer confidence. To take our contrarian thinking to its logical conclusion, we should all be rooting for higher interest rates. Seriously. Rock bottom rates are sustained when concern over inflation is replaced by fears of disinflation and outright deflation. Higher rates, on the other hand, are a sign of increasing confidence in our future economic prospects.
One last point. While I think the bubblers have misread the short-term relationship between rising interest rates and house prices, I am not altogether bullish about the immediate direction of house prices. We have seen substantial price appreciation in the last few years, and despite o
David Larock is an independent mortgage planner and industry insider specializing in helping clients purchase, refinance or renew their mortgages. David's posts appear weekly on this blog (movesmartly.com) and on his own blog (integratedmortgageplanners.com/blog). Email Dave
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