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: TREB urges caution over vacant-home tax, why the worst may be yet to come for Toronto housing and why you shouldn't bank on your house for your retirement fund.
Elsewhere: Banks say the Canadian housing market is in good shape, a discouraging lesson for homeless advocates in LA and a blow to Jeremy Corbyn's housing proposal.
Toronto
Toronto Real Estate Board urges caution over vacant-home tax (Toronto Star)
The Toronto Real Estate Board is urging the city to exercise caution regarding a possible vacant-home tax. The board says it’s worried there is not enough data or evidence to support the idea that a vacancy tax would increase the supply of rental housing.
Why the ‘worst may be yet to come’ for Toronto housing (BNN)
Toronto’s housing market failed to stage the September comeback the real estate industry was hoping for, and a prominent mortgage industry expert is warning the “worst may be yet to come.”
Don’t bank on your house for retirement fund, watchdog warns. But 45% of Ontarians do (Financial Post)
“Owning a home is not a substitute for retirement planning,” said Tyler Fleming, director of the investor office at the OSC, which found homeowners without any retirement savings or plan are among those most likely to be counting on value of their home appreciating.
To make any rental market better, hit rent-control-delete (The Globe and Mail)
In cities that have brought in rent control in the past, including Toronto in the 1970s, very little rental stock gets built afterward – which helps explain why controls were eventually lifted in Ontario for buildings that went up after 1991.
1,000 planned rental units convert to condos in wake of Ontario rent-control expansion (The Globe)
More than 1,000 planned purpose-built rental units have instead been converted to condominiums in the Greater Toronto Area since Premier Kathleen Wynne's government expanded rent control in the spring, according to a new report that warns the region's rental supply crisis is poised to worsen.
Canada
The Canadian housing market is in good shape, and so are the banks, analysts say (Financial Post)
Despite rising interest rates and various policy measures implemented to slow pricing growth, the Canadian housing market is not on track for a sharp decline. It nonetheless bears watching, as the domestic mortgage market is a big factor for the Canadian banks.
Canada’s GDP stall shows housing is becoming drag on the economy (Financial Post)
Over the past year, Canada’s economy has been running at a pace rarely seen in the past couple of decades, including an annualized 4.5 per cent rate in the second quarter. The above potential growth is soaking up all the remaining excess capacity in the economy, prompting the Bank of Canada to raise interest rates twice since July.
Housing affordability the worst it’s been in 27 years. Here’s a cross-Canada look (Global News)
“We estimate that this potentially could lift the RBC aggregate affordability measure up by a further 3.5 per cent nationwide,” RBC’s senior economist Craig Wright said in a press release, noting that other factors such as income gains could affect this. The least-affordable place to purchase a home remains the Vancouver area, where it worsened after two quarters of improvement.
September 29, 2017
This Week In Real Estate |