A Directionless Summer + The Young Buyers Club

This Week in Real Estate in Toronto: A directionless summer draws lowball offers and how people under 30 managed to buy in the city.

Elsewhere: The conversation regarding young adults and housing in Canada, when a suburb tries to densify and how about half a house instead?

Toronto

Toronto's directionless summer real-estate market draws lowball offers (The Globe and Mail)

Patrick Rocca of Bosley Real Estate Ltd. says the action has been so unpredictable so far in 2018 that agents don't really know what to expect.

The Young Buyers Club (Toronto Life)

We never thought we’d be able to afford a house. Then, in 2016, I saw a listing for a rundown place at Queen and Shaw for $499,000. We didn’t want it, but the price made us realize we could maybe do this, and we started searching for real.

Real estate still ripe for disruption, says ex-CEO (Toronto Star)

Using software and artificial intelligence to transform the real estate transaction is still a viable idea, says the former CEO of a failed Toronto start-up brokerage. Keith McSpurren says TheRedPin, which went into receivership last Thursday, was founded on some sound principles even if its big ambitions of disrupting the real estate industry with technology weren’t realized.

Toronto ranked worst city in North America for commuting (Blog TO)

Using various traffic scorecards, cost of living and public transport indexes, the firm determined that Toronto has the sixth-worst commute, globally, and the very worst commute in North America.

Canada

Millennials and housing: ‘The kettle is close to boiling’ (The Globe and Mail)

A few cities aside, the housing market in Canada has cooled to a point where prices are either dropping or rising just a little. Yet the temperature is definitely rising in the dialogue about young adults and home ownership.

The Canadian housing market’s volatility has become “acute,” according to this bank (Buzz Buzz)

“Canadian housing market volatility has become acute since the end of 2017,” writes the TD economics team, in a recent note. “Regulatory changes at both the national and provincial level (especially in B.C.) resulted in outsized swings in resale activity.”

B.C. Government to launch registry of who owns real estate in province (Global)

“British Columbia has developed a reputation as an attractive place to anonymously invest and hide wealth. Right now in B.C., real estate investors can hide behind numbered companies, offshore and domestic trusts, and corporations,” said Carole James, Minister of Finance.

USA

When a Suburb Tries to Densify, Forget ‘Minnesota Nice’ (City Lab)

Much of the attention around affordable housing in the U.S. has tended to focus on cities like New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle—densely built urban areas where land for new housing is in short supply. But most Americans live in suburbs, many of which are seeing rapidly increasing poverty and racial diversity. Here, the need for affordable housing can be just as acute, but the dynamics of the issue are distinct from the urban version—and, often, more complex.

Where are the migrant child facilities? Scattered across America (Washington Post)

Across the United States, the federal government is responsible for the care of more than 11,200 migrant children in about 100 shelters, which includes the 2,500 removed from their parents in the past five weeks. The rest are youngsters who came across the border alone. It’s a billion-dollar industry that has grown rapidly under the Trump administration’s push to close the border.

NYC’s new housing lottery guidelines aim to protect vulnerable New Yorkers (Curbed)

According to HPD, the changes will hit on four particular pain points for applicants: reducing the necessary paperwork, making eligibility guidelines more clear, reducing the impact that debt and credit history has on an application, and enacting more protections for survivors of domestic abuse.