There’s an article over at CNBC talking about the National real estate market, it’s warning signs and various slumps.
They revisit Vancouver Real Estate agent Keith Roy’s very public decision to sell his house last year and say prices have dropped 3.9% in Vancouver, 5.6% in West Van.
They also talk about lending practices in Canada and recent efforts to return CMHC amortization terms to their historical norm.
Some of the loopholes people use to avoid the mortgage restrictions are quite extraordinary. For example, although the government requires buyers to purchase private mortgage insurance on mortgages with 100 percent loan-to-value ratios, eHow says this can be avoided just by getting two mortgages, each for 50 percent of the home value.
Canadians are also allowed to borrow against pensions and life insurance policies to fund their down payments. Even credit cards can be used to fund down payments. So it’s very possible that the total housing debt is actually much higher than the official mortgage debt numbers.
If this sort of thing is being openly discussed even after the government has launched its efforts to curb lending excess, just imagine what kind of shenanigans were going on before the crackdown. The quality of the mortgages made in 2011 and 2012 may turn out to be much worse than is commonly suspected.
Read the full article here.
So is the Canadian market falling apart at this point? Â Vancouver has certainly fallen over the last year and this is starting to have an effect on developers as well – the Alba has been put on hold due to a ‘challenging real estate market‘.
