Canadian home prices forecast to surge late this year

Canadian home prices forecast to surge late this year

Canadian house prices are expected to climb significantly in the second half of 2018, driven by price gains in the Toronto region as buyers adapt to new mortgage rules that cooled the market in the first half of the year. A new forecast by Royal LePage predicts home prices will rise to a national aggregate price of $641,597 by the end of the year.

Globe and Mail (Subscription required) – Globe and Mail – Financial Post – CBC

Canada’s roaring housing market is a global anomaly

There are mountains of opinions about where Canada’s home prices are headed next. Let’s not add to the pile. Rather, let’s examine a less-appreciated aspect of the debate – just how unusual Canada’s housing obsession is by international standards. Whether you measure the housing boom in relation to fundamentals, or simply by our dedication to investing in bricks and mortar, Canada stands out against its global peers.

Globe and Mail (Subscription required)

Firm Capital Corporation marks 30 years in business

Firm Capital Corporation is celebrating 30 years in the private equity business, and the company’s growth since founder Eli Dadouch combined his interests in real estate and finance has been substantial. “Our name has been associated with literally thousands of homes,” said Dadouch, Firm Capital’s president and chief executive officer. “A lot of housing was created thanks to our participation in transactions.”

Property Biz Canada

CMHC shifts gears amid falling demand for insured mortgages

The federal government’s mortgage insurer is reorganizing to adapt to falling demand for its core insurance products because of tighter federal mortgage rules. Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., a Crown corporation that insures mortgages for home buyers who have secured a house with a down payment of at least 20 per cent, is increasing its focus on insuring apartment buildings and administering social-housing programs.

Globe and Mail (Subscription required)

Apartment financiers to developers: Do your homework

Developers looking to get their projects out of the ground were out in good numbers to hear real estate lenders discuss financing at the recent North American New Apartment Construction and Mixed-Use Symposium + Expo at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre

Property Biz Canada

Hollyburn acquires Toronto, Calgary multi-res buildings

Vancouver-based Hollyburn Properties has acquired two multi-residential properties in desirable neighbourhoods in Toronto and Calgary from Industrial Alliance. Tony Manganiello of Cushman & Wakefield, which listed the properties, said there was strong interest for both the La Salle Tower in Toronto’s Davisville neighbourhood and Calgary’s Central Towers in the Beltline.

Property Biz Canada

Blackstone enters Canadian multi-family, JVs with Starlight

Blackstone Property Partners might be the world’s largest private equity real estate investor, but its global portfolio has been lacking assets in a key Canadian sector. That deficiency is one factor which led to a partnership with Starlight Investments to purchase six Canadian multi-family buildings in Toronto and Montreal.

Property Biz Canada

Stone & South brings luxury condos to Gananoque

The Eastern Ontario town of Gananoque offers prime waterfront views, and the suites at The CaraCo Group of Companies’ Stone & South condominium project will offer some of the best. Stone & South originally had plans for 89 units in two six-storey, concrete buildings, but early buyers exclusively chose suites with waterfront views. Following a redesign, each of the 70 units offers both water and city views.

Property Biz Canada

Toronto’s TAS Design Build creates mixed-use library, multi-res

Toronto builder TAS Design Build is filling two needs with its first foray into the apartment sector at 299 Campbell Ave. The development will provide much-needed rental housing in the Junction Triangle as well as a larger, more modern public library branch for the neighbourhood. It’s yet another twist on the mixed-use concept, which has become almost the standard for multi-residential projects in many GTA neighbourhoods.

Property Biz Canada

Developers racing to cash in on hot Ottawa rental market

A consortium of local developers have an ambitious proposal to build Ottawa’s tallest highrise in a project that will feature more than 1,200 apartments ​– just one of many buildings that will add to the city’s stock of purpose-built rental units. Last year, developers in Ottawa started construction on 1,500 new apartment units as developers who’d soured on a soft condo market rushed to meet pent-up demand on the rental side.

Ottawa Business Journal

Don’t blame real estate investors for rental market woes

Unlike owner-occupied housing, our understanding of rental housing is inadequate at best. Even basic information on the rental market, such as by the type and size of housing and across neighbourhoods, is not readily available. This leaves landlords, investors, and renters make do with incomplete and, at times, dated information.

Financial Post

Montreal landlords, you can now be fined more easily

With the July 1 moving day just around the corner, Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante has announced her administration’s plan for taking on recalcitrant landlords with more inspections and harsher fines. The plan includes: tripling the number of inspections to 31,200 over the next four years. issuing parking ticket-like fines to landlords for housing infractions and creating a website where tenants can get information on their building. making fumigation reports public.

CBC

Montreal real estate undergoes rental renaissance

A renaissance in rental construction is projected to add tens of thousands of new apartment units in the Montreal area during the next few years, and they’re not your typical cheap urban flats. The new building trend is for higher-end — and in some cases, luxury — rentals, designed to appeal to up-and-coming young professionals and downsizing baby boomers.

Montreal Gazette

Mattamy Homes enters the South Florida market

Mattamy Homes, the largest privately-owned homebuilder in North America, recently closed on more than 7,800 residential lots in Tradition to establish the company’s flagship development in the South Florida region.  The purchase provides Mattamy with 2,780 acres planned for 7,800 homesites for single-family, multifamily and active-adult homes, as well as 150 acres of commercial land.

Canada Newswire

Tricon creates $2B JV to buy rental homes in U.S.

Toronto-based Tricon Capital Group Inc. has announced a major American joint venture through which it plans to purchase up to 12,000 single-family rental homes for its Tricon American Homes division. The joint venture, involving an unnamed “sovereign wealth fund” and a U.S.-based state pension plan, will be capitalized with a total of US$750 million, with each of the three partners committing $250 million.

Property Biz Canada

Market Conditions

NYC condos becoming rentals at a record rate

At a new luxury-condo building in Brooklyn, one buyer told broker Ryan Serhant she’d like three apartments, one for herself and two as investments to rent out. The tower, 550 Vanderbilt, had more buyers become landlords in 2017 than any other condo project in the city. A record 10.7 per cent of all New York condos sold last year were listed as rentals within months.

Bloomberg

Seattle landlords dangle freebies to fill empty apartments

For years, the Seattle rental market was so heated that renters would constantly monitor online listings and quickly show up to available apartments. Those days are over. A glut of new apartments washing over the city has quickly turned the tables as vacancy rates hit their highest levels since the recession, led by downtown Seattle, where one-fourth of all apartments are now sitting empty.

Seattle Times

Mortgage and Finance

Homeowners need to beef up flood insurance

Many Canadians are vulnerable to flood but don’t know it. This is at least partly because flood is almost universally viewed by property owners as a phenomenon associated only with rivers, creeks, streams and the like. But flooding can happen virtually any place where heavy rain may fall, which, for Canada, means just about anywhere.

Globe and Mail

TD mobile app connects mortgage advisors with house hunters

TD Bank Group (TD) announced the launch of a mortgage concierge service as the newest feature within its leading mobile banking app. Using geolocation technology, the new service connects customers with mobile mortgage specialists who are nearby and available, offering seamless access to mortgage advice for TD mobile customers. 

Canada Newswire

New Developments

A long-awaited, expensive fix for McKenzie Lake escarpment

Southeast residents in Calgary are breathing a sigh of relief as an expensive project to stabilize a slope that was crumbling just metres from dozens of homes nears completion. The southeast neighbourhoods of McKenzie Lake and Douglasdale wake up each morning to the sounds of heavy machinery driving piles deep into the bedrock below more than 24 homes on an escarpment bordering Fish Creek Park.

Calgary Herald

Colonnade Bridgeport plans residential by Carlingwood Mall

An Ottawa developer is planning to construct a pair of residential buildings at the corner of Carling and Woodroffe avenues, across the street from one of the city’s oldest shopping centres.  Colonnade Bridgeport has filed a rezoning application with the city for the property at 485 Ancaster Rd.

Ottawa Business Journal

Seasonal Homes

Rural Canada’s Airbnb quandary

On a June morning, Danny Robinson is busy doing some last-minute work around his four-bedroom yellow-shingled home that overlooks scenic St. Anns Bay on Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island. Robinson, 68, has owned the house for three decades, but in recent years had to spend time away to work in northern Alberta as a subcontractor.

CBC

Can cottagers keep Ontario’s lake regions afloat?

It wasn’t enough for Chris Van Lierop and Tim Wisener to move their home design business from Toronto to cottage country. They wanted to contribute to the vitality of Fenelon Falls with a shop that would attract passersby. So the couple opened the Colborne Gallery, specializing in local art, in a storefront adjoining their design studio.

Toronto Star

Renovation, Repair and Maintenance

Kitchen renovation has greatest potential to boost sale price

According to a cross-Canada survey of over 750 Royal LePage real estate experts, a kitchen renovation is the clear upgrade of choice with the potential to boost a property’s value by more than 12.5 per cent.¹ Both ranking second, a finished basement or a new bathroom has the potential to increase a property’s value between 2.5 per cent and 12.5 per cent, depending on the investment.

Canada Newswire

Affordable Housing

Major job site at Habitations Saint-Michel Nord in Montréal

The 185-unit housing complex will be completely transformed to provide tenants with modern, safer, quality housing. The $54.3-million rejuvenation under way at Habitations Saint-Michel Nord in Montréal is the largest renovation project ever undertaken by the Office municipal d’habitation de Montréal (OMHM). Rightly called “HLM de demain,” or low-rental housing of tomorrow.

Canada Newswire

New Westminster council disrupted by modular housing protest

A New Westminster city council hearing for a proposed modular housing development intended for women who are either homeless or at risk of homelessness needed the intervention of police Tuesday night. New Westminster’s police chief, along with officials from BC Housing, Fraser Health and the Elizabeth Fry Society all spoke in support of the project.

Vancouver Sun

Other

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