There are a few organizations that have raised a public alarm over the state of the Canadian housing market, with particular focus on Toronto and Vancouver:

The IMF, The Bank of Canada, The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, Most of the big banks, The OECD, and more.

It seems that everyone is freaking out about the Canadian housing market.

Despite industry assurances that the hottest housing markets in Canada, particularly Vancouver, will always remain hot, and that it is physically impossible for prices to decline in this miracle economy, Canadians are now becoming aware that those assurances have just been another load of industry hype. And a larger share of them are starting to grapple with a new reality – a reality in an over-leveraged, inflated housing market where prices have come to rest on the edge of a cliff.

In Vancouver’s once white-hot commercial real estate market, the hunt is now on for Chinese buyers as big institutional investors are trying to unload.

And yet, despite years of warnings here we are near record high house prices. If you bought a few years back and sold a month ago, you’ve done quite well.

So it seems we’re now entering another down phase, with reports of softening sales and prices, especially at the high end. The warnings are getting louder, but of course there are always people who propose that this market is different and will never truly crash.

Sometimes the number of warnings and lack of crash almost seems to prove it – Just like the boy who cried wolf, we start to get desensitized to all the warnings.  Unfortunately for some of the villagers we all know how that story ends.