Toronto and Vancouver real estate

[WhipperSnapper]

Originally Posted by SpongeG

Toronto home sales drop 40% compared with a year ago

Average selling price of all homes in GTA was $746,218, up 5% from a year ago

The Canadian Press Posted: Aug 03, 2017 7:24 AM ET Last Updated: Aug 03, 2017 8:54 AM ET

Home sales in the Greater Toronto Area tanked last month and prices continued to recede, the city's real estate board said Thursday, further evidence that provincial measures aimed at cooling one of the hottest housing markets in North America may be working.

The number of transactions fell 40.4 per cent in July compared to the same month last year, driven by fewer sales of detached homes in Toronto and its surrounding areas.

Home sales in Greater Toronto Area plunged 37.3% last month
Toronto housing market downturn to be short-lived, federal housing agency says
The average selling price of all homes in the Greater Toronto Area was $746,218, up five per cent from a year ago.

However, it's the third consecutive monthly decline and the average price down nearly $175,000 since April, when the Ontario government introduced more than a dozen changes — including a 15 per cent tax on foreign buyers — in an effort to stabilize prices that were spiralling out of reach for many homebuyers.

...

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toront...july-1.4233295

No surprise here. I've already had a number of agents contact us to see if we want to list. This spring had a couple absolutely crazy months. They shouldn't be this desperate already.

[geotag277]

40% huh? Remarkably similar to Vancouver.

For everything that is happening in Toronto now, just look at what happened to Vancouver after the foreign buyer tax.

Very interesting that averages are still up year over year - if I remember correctly, Vancouver averages actually fell year over year. Perhaps signs that Toronto won't be as impacted as Vancouver was in the months following the foreign buyer tax? Median prices (which matter more), I don't think ever went down in Vancouver.

One major difference between Toronto and Vancouver is probably the sheer number of realtors. I imagine it is much much higher in Toronto, so when the volume of transactions goes down so much, a lot of fat is going to get trimmed in that sector. I expect many realtors will make last ditch desperate gambits to hold onto business.

[christmas]

http://dailyhive.com/vancouver/forei...er-one-year-on

Vancouver real estate seems to be moving elsewhere, according to data collected by a Chinese international real estate website.

Throughout the months of August, inquiries into Seattle and Toronto properties were up 143.2% and 142.6%, respectively, compared to the same month in 2015.

In contrast, inquiries about Vancouver plummeted by 81% during the same period.

....

New data released by the provincial government suggests the retreat of foreign investment in residential real estate in Metro Vancouver.

In August, home sales to foreign buyers plummeted to just 0.9% in response to the surprise introduction of the extra property transfer tax.

Overall, foreign buyers were responsible for just 1.3% of the 12,114 transactions that took place since the government introduced the tax.

[whatnext]

Originally Posted by geotag277

40% huh? Remarkably similar to Vancouver.

For everything that is happening in Toronto now, just look at what happened to Vancouver after the foreign buyer tax.

Very interesting that averages are still up year over year - if I remember correctly, Vancouver averages actually fell year over year. Perhaps signs that Toronto won't be as impacted as Vancouver was in the months following the foreign buyer tax? Median prices (which matter more), I don't think ever went down in Vancouver.

One major difference between Toronto and Vancouver is probably the sheer number of realtors. I imagine it is much much higher in Toronto, so when the volume of transactions goes down so much, a lot of fat is going to get trimmed in that sector. I expect many realtors will make last ditch desperate gambits to hold onto business.

It will be different for a few reasons. The ON foreign buyer legislation included pre-sales, BC didn't because pre-sale condo sellers were big funders of the BC Libs. Also ON has rent control and Wynne included all newbuild condos that are rented out in that bucket. Second, it seems that TO had a true speculative hype bubble driven I suspect by the rumour that all Vancouver's Chinese buyers were going to head to TO, so "buy now or lose out forever"! However the numbers didn't materialize and data showed foreign buyers made up a much smaller part of the TO market.

[osmo]

Originally Posted by whatnext

It will be different for a few reasons. The ON foreign buyer legislation included pre-sales, BC didn't because pre-sale condo sellers were big funders of the BC Libs. Also ON has rent control and Wynne included all newbuild condos that are rented out in that bucket. Second, it seems that TO had a true speculative hype bubble driven I suspect by the rumour that all Vancouver's Chinese buyers were going to head to TO, so "buy now or lose out forever"! However the numbers didn't materialize and data showed foreign buyers made up a much smaller part of the TO market.

Or, how about not. Outside money is only 5-8% of the market, this isn;t rumour but a pointed piece of data. This drop is a baseball bat to the psychology of Torontonians who on both sides, Buy and Sell, think they can get a better deal and you see the ramifications with this with the sudden drop.

Even the slime monsters at the Toronto RE Board (TREB) are having to admit now that foreign money was a small slice of the market. TREB has had the data for years and has sat on it, keeping it secret to the masses, they are using now as a crutch to cry foul on the ON Gov in a bid to spin public perception against the Libs for the forthcoming election.

Overall though I do expect this all just to follow Vancouver. This is all a dead cat bounce back to insanity. Only killing off access to cheap debt will stop this housing bubble. Until interest rates rise, nothing will change aside from things getting more expensive.

[WhipperSnapper]

Stop being so gullible. The line is 5 to 8% of end users buying real estate are foreign based. That doesn't exclude a sizable portion of the billions being speculated per year in Toronto and Canada's real estate growth and development isn't coming from foreign sources through Canadian real estate investment fund managers. And, yeah, they are from dozens and dozens of countries.

[lio45]

We corrected him several times already - 5% to 8% of buyers are having their Canadian real estate held in the name of a foreign owner, while x% of Canadian buyers are using foreign money but the real estate they buy doesn't end up getting owned directly by foreigners in the property records, for various good reasons.

To have the real data you've got to sum the two. (For the record, I've been suggesting ways to roughly get correct-ish data for years on this forum, it's not rocket science.)

[someone123]

Originally Posted by lio45

We corrected him several times already - 5% to 8% of buyers are having their Canadian real estate held in the name of a foreign owner, while x% of Canadian buyers are using foreign money but the real estate they buy doesn't end up getting owned directly by foreigners in the property records, for various good reasons.

To have the real data you've got to sum the two. (For the record, I've been suggesting ways to roughly get correct-ish data for years on this forum, it's not rocket science.)

Looking at the census data for metro Vancouver, over 40% of people declare their mother tongue to be something other than English, French, or an aboriginal language. Richmond, BC, our simultaneous poverty and million dollar McMansion capital, is about 62%. 10% of people in Richmond don't speak any official language.

I realize this is kind of taboo but if BC has affordability problems that are due to overcrowding instead of speculation, shouldn't this have some impact on how many newcomers we accept? Instead it seems to be full steam ahead, even though most native-born people can't afford to buy property here and a lot of them are leaving.

[WhipperSnapper]

It's guesswork to evaluate the impact of foreign investors on development. It doesn't really matter from where it came. The average Toronto condo developer can barely afford to purchase one high density downtown property in Toronto let alone throw up a 50 storey condo on it and yet they manage multiple projects in the hundreds of millions of dollars all the time. Imagine how quickly developers would turn from bidding wars to low ball offers if that funding avenue ceased.

[whatnext]

Originally Posted by osmo

Or, how about not. Outside money is only 5-8% of the market, this isn;t rumour but a pointed piece of data. This drop is a baseball bat to the psychology of Torontonians who on both sides, Buy and Sell, think they can get a better deal and you see the ramifications with this with the sudden drop.

Even the slime monsters at the Toronto RE Board (TREB) are having to admit now that foreign money was a small slice of the market. TREB has had the data for years and has sat on it, keeping it secret to the masses, they are using now as a crutch to cry foul on the ON Gov in a bid to spin public perception against the Libs for the forthcoming election.

Overall though I do expect this all just to follow Vancouver. This is all a dead cat bounce back to insanity. Only killing off access to cheap debt will stop this housing bubble. Until interest rates rise, nothing will change aside from things getting more expensive.

Nope, discredited viewpoint. As WhipperSnapper points out stats don't even count permanent residents or new Canadians who get the money from China. Plus, 5% is enough to distort a market:

...BMO economists Doug Porter and Robert Kavcic concluded that any new government policies to cool down the housing market should be directed towards reigning in “foreign investment, speculation and land restrictions, in that order.”

Porter and Kavcic pinpoint several factors behind nosebleed-level price accelerations concentrated in those two Canadian cities. A demographic surge of young people aged 25-40 (prime homebuying years) combined with the reluctance of baby boomers to downsize means there is a lot of pressure being placed on the detached home market...

...Demand from foreign buyers is also playing a significant role in these two markets, and is also beginning to play a role in Montreal.

“While many downplay this factor ('it’s only X% of the buyers!'), Economics 101 will tell you that the marginal buyer sets the price; and, if you introduce a wave of new buyers on an already tight market, prices will soon reach for the sky as the demand curve shifts even slightly to the right,” Porter and Kavcic write...(bold mine)

https://www.biv.com/article/2016/6/n...focus-foreign/