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Canada’s real estate market has been booming for years, but recently things have begun to turn. In October, Toronto’s new home prices dropped the most in one month since 1996. Is this the start of a more protracted downturn or is Canada going to pull-off a soft-landing in housing? Greg Quinn reports on the market for Bloomberg:
The housing market has moderated this year as federal rules made it harder to qualify for a mortgage. The Bank of Canada also raised its trend-setting interest rate five times between July 2017 and October of this year. New home prices were advancing at an annual pace of almost 4 percent late last year before the mortgage rules took effect.
New home prices advanced 0.4 percent in Vancouver, while they declined on a 12-month basis in Edmonton and Calgary in the struggling oil-producing province of Alberta.
On a monthly basis, new home prices were unchanged in October from September. The index includes single-family, semi- detached and row houses, but doesn’t capture condominiums that have become more popular in Toronto in recent years.
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