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: Sales plunge in February, the party is over according to the data and is this a crash in the making?
Elsewhere: RBC chief issues warning to foreign investors in Canadian real estate, white flight persists in America's suburbs and a possible solution for London's housing crisis.
Toronto
Toronto-area home prices drop more than 12% in February as sales plunge (Toronto Star)
The number of sales also plunged nearly 35 per cent last month compared to February 2017 — to 5,175 transactions from last year’s record 7,955, according to the latest statistics from the Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB) on Tuesday.
Real estate sales are cratering around the GTA. Is this a crash in the making? (Macleans)
This is the new reality in many parts of Ontario. After years of booming prices and a few months of complete insanity, the housing market in many cities is falling back to earth.
In Toronto’s Housing Market, The Party Really Is Over, Latest Data Shows (Huffington Post)
The once-unstoppable juggernaut that was Greater Toronto's housing market has slowed to a crawl, with preliminary data for February showing sales taking a deep dive and prices well off last year's highs.
Toronto's housing market is tanking (Business Insider)
“The story here is clearly not about lack of supply…but rather composition of supply,” Bank of Montreal chief economist Doug Porter wrote in a note to investors. “Indeed, note that Toronto starts jumped to the highest since at least 1990, but all of the gain was in condos.”
RBC chief issues warning to foreign investors in Canadian real estate (The Globe)
Foreign inflows are distorting Canada's already constrained housing market and aren't the kind of investment the country needs, the chief executive officer of Royal Bank of Canada said.
Vancouver’s empty-homes tax might not affect as many homeowners as predicted (The Globe)
Almost 8,500 Vancouver homeowners either declared that their properties were empty for much of last year or failed to confirm that their units are occupied, making them potentially liable for paying the city's precedent-setting empty-homes tax.
"As we celebrate these steps, we would be naive to think that this investment is sufficient to fully repair our badly damaged housing infrastructure," the report from the Social Planning Council of Winnipeg and the Right to Housing Coalition says.
This continuing trend has a number of consequences for an increasingly multicultural America, none of them positive. Kye notes that, traditionally, racial segregation has been “a key predictor of reduced life chances, across health, academic, and economic outcomes.”
New York Housing Is Getting (Gasp!) More Affordable (Wall Street Journal)
“Rising vacancy rates citywide are a sign that, overall, the housing supply is starting to catch up with demand, helping to relieve the upward pressure on housing costs,” said Mark Willis, a senior policy fellow at the NYU Furman Center. But, he noted, the effects were uneven, with vacancy rates falling to 2.71% in the Bronx.
A basic need: American infrastructure must include housing (The Hill)
This isn’t new. Unlike Canada, Australia and most European countries, the United States never has considered housing as infrastructure. But with affordable housing and homelessness reaching new crisis levels in communities across the country, it’s an outlook that needs to change.
March 9, 2018
This Week In Real Estate |