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The Housing Market needs to crash.

Of course there's going to be a correction. At almost 9%, the unemployment rate in this city is way above the national average, so there shouldn't be that many $400k+ 1 bdrm condo units for sale, but there really are.
Anyway, Canada's banking system has been universally praised after the credit crunch pricked housing bubbles all over the planet ... praised for having the necessary regulations in place and having old-school lending requirements. But what I find really bizarre and outright reckless is that Canada doesn't track foreign money in our real estate sector. Flaherty, Harper, ask any politician ... nobody seems to know just how much foreign money has made its way into Canadian housing stock. And if they don't know, they're not receiving any tax revenue off the gains enjoyed by foreign investors/entities buying up entire floors of condo units before the developers even open up a sales centre for the general public ... and flipping their interests as need be.
Of course there's going to be a crash, and crashes are never pretty, lots of victims. I'm just totally disappointed Canada hasn't done the same as Australia and other countries that put restrictions on property ownership by foreigners. If they did, we're guaranteed prices would start to fall immediately, just like what is currently happening in Australia after they woke up a couple years ago and restricted property ownership by foreigners.
 
I think a crash is imminent.

Prices for just about everything in this city are high ($5 milk? WTF?). House and condo prices are rising. Unemployment rate is high, wages aren't as high as they should be and they're also not rising as quickly as they should be (annual raises seem to be a thing of the past after the downturn).
 
TheKingEast said:
I think a crash is imminent.

Prices for just about everything in this city are high ($5 milk? WTF?). House and condo prices are rising. Unemployment rate is high, wages aren't as high as they should be and they're also not rising as quickly as they should be (annual raises seem to be a thing of the past after the downturn).
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Disgusting.

Look at this

Kristin, 33, loves renting in Burnaby, a suburb of Vancouver, where she and her husband work. Since the couple’s first child came along six months ago, however, she’s decided it’s time to find a bigger home.

Lifestyle is important. Her husband is a landscape architect and they both like gardening, so a sizable yard is a must. They’re willing to relocate to a smaller city – Victoria or Nanaimo – in order to find the space they want. For Kristin, a mechanical engineer, it might mean finding another job for less pay, but it’s a sacrifice she’s willing to make.
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/glob...0000-fixer-upper-out-of-reach/article2412101/
 
Hipster Duck said:
^Back then, very few of you had kids, so there was no impetus to move into a house. The large pool of decent, recently-built, rent-controlled, multi-unit rental housing stock that was built precisely because of the demand generated by the requirements of your demographic group at the time did very nicely.
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Also, Urban Shocker's generation did move into houses in huge numbers, though perhaps not people in his circles. There was a massive amount of townhouse complexes and semi/link-detached houses built on the edge of the city (places like Mississauga, north Scarborough, etc.) that offered entry-level housing for boomers and their young families.

Those hundreds of new rental apartment buildings also housed new im/migrants, whose numbers picked up at the time, and small households/families who previously would have shared a house or rented a room.
 
ol is there something wrong with moving to a different city for a bigger house with no job promises?? I think so

also, Unemployment rates are a joke, I bet it is close to 20-25% for actual Full time jobs
 
Developer has no fear of a Toronto condo bubble

“From an urban fabric point of view, Toronto is unique in the world,” Mr. Diamond said in an interview. “It’s one of the few cities that has both a very healthy core and low-rise single-family homes almost within walking distance of the core.”

Twelve years ago, most of the new housing in Toronto was low-rise homes. Now most of it is high-rise towers. Construction of single homes is at all-time lows.

Immigration trends suggest that the Toronto census metropolitan area will need between 42,500 and 52,000 new dwellings a year. Only 28,500 were delivered last year, Mr. Diamond noted. Vacancy rates remain low.

“Every market is cyclical,” he said. “But Toronto has a great, great future. Unless something that emerges that’s going to throw this city completely off base, we have a lot of confidence.”
More.............http://www.theglobeandmail.com/repo...ear-of-a-toronto-condo-bubble/article2425295/
 
That article points out something that's often overlooked when people talk about the condo market - the amount of low rise housing is dropping every year. So the number of overall units built in the GTA every year isn't really rising at all (I don't have any numbers though). It's just that more and more of those units are in high density buildings.
 
WanderLust said:
But what I find really bizarre and outright reckless is that Canada doesn't track foreign money in our real estate sector. Flaherty, Harper, ask any politician ... nobody seems to know just how much foreign money has made its way into Canadian housing stock. And if they don't know, they're not receiving any tax revenue off the gains enjoyed by foreign investors/entities buying up entire floors of condo units before the developers even open up a sales centre for the general public ... and flipping their interests as need be.
Of course there's going to be a crash, and crashes are never pretty, lots of victims.
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Well, it'll certainly free up some housing stock, even though so many of these Flipper Units of investment space are so tiny no normal person would want to live in them. With aging Boomers refusing to budge from their in-demand housing stock - or perhaps, in future, transferring ownership of it directly to their children rather than putting their houses on the market, and the advent of the green belt severely restricting construction of such traditional single family dwellings, and the city's policy of concentrating highrise, multi-unit housing along transit lines, and the exporting of China's bubble economy to our real estate market, there's a fascinating witches' brew of possibilities.
 
I don't know how many times I need to post this but the logic of some of the previous arguments is utterly refuted by history. The number of units needed and the level of population growth and the level of immigration is IRRELEVANT to the probability of a crash and the present cost of housing. I repeat irrelevant. This is shear real estate market propaganda.

Population growth and immigration and a rational number of units to service that population has an influence on the long-term AVERAGE GROWTH IN DEMAND for living space. Note I do not say average price, nor do I say number of units. That is because the average price has nothing to do with how many people there are but just how much people can afford. Also, living space is important not number of units. When affordability errodes people squeeze themselves into less space. You could easily compress our population into half the number of existing living units if affordability deteriorated as it would in the event of a major run up in interest rates.

Lastly, if the real estate industry actually believe their own hype about population and immigration and rational number of units instead of recognizing it for the marketing pitch it is than that is when we know that there is a true bubble ready to burst. In otherwords we better hope that the real estate industry is trying to fool us. If they believe their own argument the vast majority of them will go bankrupt, as is historically the case.
 
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Institutional money knows this is major bubble. They require insurance before buying traditional mortage ( at least 20% equity) tranches. Without insurance they will not buy them. This is a recent phenom. It is time to privatize the CMHC and stop this mass subsidy.
 
TheKingEast said:
Prices for just about everything in this city are high ($5 milk? WTF?).
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Only $1.25 a litre?

I'd have thought that milk would generally be more expensive than oil.

But hey, if you want them to cut more corners to make the milk cheaper, go ahead. I'll stick to organic.
 
Toronto is a big city. Get used to it.

Like most big cities, single family houses in Toronto are extremely expensive because they are in short supply. People will have to get used to living in condos like other big cities, and that includes families with children. Our congested highway system cannot accommodate any more people commuting 1 hour each way in heavy rush hour traffic to and from distant suburbs.

Unless you are wealthy, you can't expect to able to afford a house close to your work in most parts of the GTA, in a decent neighbourhood. This includes not only houses near downtown, but many of the more desirable parts of the 905 such as Markham are also very expensive.
 
I agree. We're becoming two cities - those of us who live in one, two, or three storey single-family houses in single-use residential communities bounded by an outer grid of major arterial roads ( my arterial bounding-block is Broadview/Danforth/Pape/Gerrard ) and those of you who live in multi-unit buildings which are increasingly being built either along those arterials or in highrise enclaves like City Place.

I'm sensing that the urban/suburban divide is melting away, too. I'm feeling increasing kinship to "suburbanites" in Scarborough or North York or Etobicroak who live in little houses bounded by an outer grid of major arterial roads, whereas I formerly felt entirely connected to the downtown cultural community to the exclusion of "suburbia".
 
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