Two years ago the average Canadian borrower was paying just under 2% for a new mortgage while bank accounts were paying near zero interest and GICs were in the 1% range. Convential wisdom was that...
Suites are extremely common in Victoria. With a stagnation in purpose built rental construction (until recent years), chronically low rental vacancy rates driving rents up, and high house prices that drive many people to mortgage...
Despite an epic rise in rates in the last year, the rates of mortgages in arrears have barely budged in BC. At 0.12% we are just barely off the all time lows of 0.10% from...
Last fall on November 24th, the provincial government curtailed the ability of strata corporations to set limits on the age of their residents. Where previously strata corps were able to set a minimum age for...
There’s a new tool out there for monitoring indicators around mortgages, housing, and financial vulnerability on a national level. The Bank of Canada has a new page with indicators of financial vulnerability that shows...
Vancouver buyers have been a significant force in the Victoria market in the last few years, starting to increase quickly in 2016 and playing a substantial role in the upswing in Victoria prices at that...
It’s nothing but puzzles on the blog lately, and here’s the latest one: The New House Price Index (NHPI) is an economic indicator developed and maintained by Statistics Canada that measures the changes in the...
There’s no doubt that we have a severe housing shortage in Canada and BC is especially bad. We can see that in long term rental vacancy rates which are lowest in BC cities (Victoria being...
A few months ago I did a deep dive into the impact of the newly unenforceable rental rules, showing that rental restrictions led to substantially lower values in condos. I also briefly looked at the...
There’s a lot of uncertainty about how prices will develop this year. On the one hand we still have higher interest rates than we’ve seen in the past few years and poor affordability is usually...
