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: Homeowners are caught between buying and selling, the provincial government considers a review of preferential condo sales and the Trump hotel gets a name change.
Elsewhere: $13 million in down payment loans shock Vancouver condo market, New York approves rent increases for regulated apartments and how Vienna solved their homelessness problem.
Toronto
As market shifts, Toronto homeowners caught between buy and sell (The Globe and Mail)
If you managed to buy a house in Toronto recently after several failed bids, you might be celebrating. Until you remember you have to sell the place you already own.
Ontario government considers review of preferential condo sales (The Globe)
Canada
$13M in down payment loans driving Vancouver condo prices up: Economist (Global)
More than 1,100 people have now taken advantage of the provincial program which will loan buyers up to five per cent of the price of a home, to a maximum of $37,000 – with a five-year grace period on interest payments.
How fighting urban sprawl inflates housing prices (Hamilton Spectator)
The market is rigged by provincial policy, especially the greenbelt policy imposed more than a decade ago. Also called urban growth boundaries, greenbelts severely limit the land available to build the new detached housing that most people prefer. As surely as severe restrictions on oil production lead to higher gasoline prices, greenbelts drive up land prices, which create much higher house prices throughout a metropolitan area.
New Brunswick real estate offers a lesson on peak housing prices (The Globe)
European cities, in general, do much better that North America in providing housing. The Austrian capital, though, has had unusual success with housing issues that dog metro areas in the Pacific Northwest.
After Grenfell Tower Fire, U.K. Asks: Has Deregulation Gone Too Far? (NY Times)
Simon Tilford, an economist and deputy director of the Center for European Reform in London, said: “We’re seeing the biggest challenge to this 40-year drive to marginalize or discredit the state and its role in the economy and society. Grenfell Tower had such impact because it symbolizes for many in Britain the retreat of the state, visible in badly maintained social housing and the failure to build more social housing.”
