Realosophy Team in Media Roundup, Toronto Real Estate News
All you need to know regarding the housing market in Toronto, Canada and abroad.
This week in Toronto: Demand for downtown condos heats up, a million dollars buys a tear-down in Greektown and the budget is balanced thanks to the housing market.
Elsewhere: A loophole in Vancouver's foreign buyers tax, popping the housing bubble in the American mind and why Brexit could thwart May's housing plans.
Toronto
Toronto foreign home buyer numbers don't add up (Toronto Star)
Toronto's Realosophy president John Pasalis is among those who fear the Vancouver experience is happening here.
"Most agents' biggest concern is obviously not immigrants. It's the fact that when you have wealthy non-residents using homes as a safety deposit box it's not good,” he said. “It drives up house prices in Toronto and makes everything unaffordable."
A million dollars now buys a tear-down in Toronto’s Greektown (The Globe)
Faulty Towers (TVO)
Toronto is becoming a condo city. For some, buying a condo is a means to a life full of urban pleasure; for others, it's a source of headaches and disappointment.
Why some Toronto realtors are paying for your moving and staging costs (CBC)
Canada
Vancouver’s foreign buyer tax and the work-permit loophole ‘you could drive Highway 99 through’ (South China Morning Post)
The rationale for the BC Liberal government to offer exemptions is sound, assuming that the goal of the tax is to improve affordability by preventing foreign capital further skewing a market that had become detached from local incomes (and is not, say, a pre-election political tactic). People who live and earn locally should not be unfairly punished.
Census 2016: Western provinces’ populations are the fastest-growing in Canada (The Globe)
For the first time since Confederation the three Prairie provinces all rank at the top of provincial growth charts, nosing out a slowing Ontario. British Columbia, in fourth place, also grew at a rate higher than the national average. Nearly one in three residents now live in Western Canada, the highest share ever recorded.
Canadian families moving to escape urban housing prices (Macleans)
The couple — he’s an Internet marketer, she’s an environmental engineer — couldn’t see themselves living in a shoebox crammed full of baby stuff, so they pulled up stakes, put their condo up for sale and moved about four hours away to Kamloops, B.C., where they bought a four-bedroom house for nearly the same price.
Canadian house-price gains slow in December, amid cooling in Toronto and Vancouver (Global)
Canadian new home prices rose less than expected in December amid a pause in price growth in the hot markets of Toronto and Vancouver, though home values continued to rise in several regions in Ontario, Statistics Canada data showed on Thursday.
USA
Popping the Housing Bubbles in the American Mind (New York Times)
A continued failure to build enough homes has in large part caused this crisis. The Economic Affairs Committee in the House of Lords estimates that we need to build 300,000 new homes a year to solve it, and the government’s own target is to build one million by 2020—equivalent to 200,000 per year. Given the number of homes built over the last two decades stands at an average of 150,000 per year, meeting that target was always going to be a challenge.
England's housing market is 'broken', government admits in white paper (The Guardian)
England’s housing market is broken, the government has admitted, with home ownership a “distant dream” for young families, as it unveiled a white paper promising a fresh wave of home building.
