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: Home sellers get a taste of buyers' anxiety, the affordability crisis that hit Vancouver comes to Toronto and a debate on the Ontario foreign buyers tax.
Elsewhere: Vancouver home price gains spill over to nearby markets, how homeownership became the engine of American inequality and gentrification, Roman-style.
Toronto
Toronto home sellers starting to get taste of buyers’ anxiety (The Globe and Mail)
A surge in real estate listings in the Greater Toronto Area is helping to calm potential buyers as the anxiety shifts to sellers who now have to wonder if anyone will show up on offer night.
Meet the Toronto broker who actually wants to cool real estate demand (Buzz Buzz News)
“The Fair Housing Plan didn’t really do anything to cool demand at all,” Pasalis, the co-founder of the Realosophy Brokerage, which publishes market commentary via its Move Smartly blog, tells BuzzBuzzNews. The foreign-buyer tax of 15 per cent doesn’t get his praise either. “When you look at it closely, there’s so many exceptions,” Pasalis says. “There’s so many loopholes that it’s not really going to slow demand on that front.”
The affordability crisis that started in Vancouver has now enveloped Toronto (Inroads Journal)
To call what is happening in Toronto a “debate” is to mislead somewhat. Differing perspectives are offered up, but the idea that many in the debate are interested in a search for “the truth” is questionable. As in Vancouver, the industry line in Toronto is that only “supply, supply, supply” can solve the problem. This has been debunked countless times, but it shuffles along unperturbed. It is a classic “zombie idea,” as Paul Krugman would say. That’s because there is simply too much money at stake for powerful people to ever allow the idea to die.
A real estate broker and a housing researcher face off over Ontario’s tax on foreign buyers (Toronto Life)
To get a sense of how the debate over the province’s plan is shaping up, we brought together two people who have very different views on the health of Toronto’s real estate market.
The funniest real estate agent ads in Toronto (Toronto Life)
Still, realtors need to work hard to land those clients in the first place. To stand out among the roughly 48,000 agents in the GTA, some of them are getting creative—and, well, a little shameless. Here, a collection of Toronto’s wackiest realtor ads.
Canada
Vancouver home price gains spill over to nearby markets: CMHC (The Globe)
USA
How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Inequality (New York Times)
Almost a decade removed from the foreclosure crisis that began in 2008, the nation is facing one of the worst affordable-housing shortages in generations.
In America’s Affordable Housing Crisis, More Demand but Less Supply (Frontline)
FRONTLINE and NPR join forces to examine the crisis in affordable housing, exploring why so few people are getting the help they need, and whether government programs designed to aid low-income Americans with rent are working as they should.
Ben Carson Thinks Public Housing Should Be Less Comfortable. America Already Made That Mistake Once. (Slate)
The $55 billion increase in all approved foreign investment in Australia, to $248 billion, was "predominantly driven by increased investment in the real estate sector", FIRB chairman Brian Wilson wrote in the report released on Tuesday.
Gentrification, Roman-Style (City Lab)
