There’s an easy narrative forming around the rise in power of sale listings across the Toronto region: people renewed at higher rates and couldn’t keep up with payments.
Higher rates are part of the story — but they are not the whole story.
For years, households across the GTA have been living beyond their means in a way that was only sustainable because home prices kept rising. Every few years, when their mortgage came up for renewal, they were able to rely on the $150K–$250K increase in their home’s value to roll credit card balances, unsecured loans and renovation costs into the mortgage.
This is something I saw repeatedly. Homeowners would buy a home with a $500,000 mortgage and, five or six years later, when they sold, their mortgage balance would be $750,000 or $800,000. Yes, part of that was renovations — but a lot of it was simply consumption.
The logic was simple:
Banks were comfortable with this because on paper, the borrower still had “equity.”
This was effectively using home equity as income.
And it only worked because home prices were rising.
Now the housing market looks very different:
A household that added $20,000–$30,000 in new debt every year now faces a situation where:
And this is where power of sale enters.
When you can’t roll revolving debt back into your mortgage, that debt becomes unmanageable very quickly. The financial cushion people believed they had wasn’t savings — it was rising home values.
Once prices stopped rising, the cushion disappeared.
So yes, interest rates matter — but the more important story is this:
Years of consuming tomorrow’s equity have collided with a housing market that is no longer going up.
The households losing their homes today aren’t simply missing one payment because rates went up. They have often been carrying layers of debt accumulated over years — masked by the ability to refinance.
Power of sale is the final step in a long pattern, not a sudden failure.
John Pasalis is President of Realosophy Realty. A specialist in real estate data analysis, John’s research focuses on unlocking micro trends in the Greater Toronto Area real estate market. His research has been utilized by the Bank of Canada, the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Have questions about your own moves in the Toronto area as a buyer, seller, investor or renter? Book a no-obligation consult with John and his team at a Realosophy here: https://www.movesmartly.com/meetjohn