Finding your dream home can be tough in the Canadian market. As prices and interest rates continue to rise, the dream of once owning a home with your partner can often feel like it’s slipping away.
However, Wahi has a new and free house hunting app for couples that is here to help. With the Wahi app, couples can finally purchase a home with confidence and get closer to landing their perfect abode. With Wahi’s collaboration feature, couples can easily peruse through house listings together in an exciting, new way.
Couples are able to keep track of each other’s listings and even receive recommendations as co-buyers. Wahi makes house hunting convenient and streamlines the communication process between partners to make finding a home a breeze.
On the app, couples can schedule house tours together, keep a record of showings, chat with each other and their Realtor and lastly, receive alerts about properties each other likes or when a showing is booked.
Wahi couldn’t have come at a better time as more Canadian couples are expected to jump into the housing market this summer. In fact, 77 per cent of Canadian homeowners purchased a home with a romantic partner, according to a Wahi survey.
As couples enter the housing market, they will face steep prices that are expected to continue rising. The national average home price is set to climb nearly five per cent to $710,468 by the end of 2024, according to the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA). And here in Toronto, $985,000 is the median price for a home in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) as of March, based on Wahi data.
To help first-time buyers get into the market, the federal government recently announced 30-year amortization periods on insured mortgages, but despite this, Canadians continue to feel strapped for cash. Not to mention the property taxes and closing costs that buyers have to consider when purchasing property.
That is why Wahi is making it easier for Toronto couples to catch a break and get some money back when buying a home with its Wahi MyBuy cash-back program.
The initiative provides customers with Realtors who offer top-notch virtual service, and they can get up to one per cent of the sale price back in cash after closing.
Torontonians, specifically, should take advantage of this exciting offer. For example, if someone purchased a $1-million home, they would get $10,000 cash back in their pockets.
Canadian couples looking to buy a home can download the Wahi app here and learn more about Wahi’s MyBuy cashback program here.
There’s a widely held belief that real estate prices will, inevitably, only rise higher and higher. There are, however, long periods when that maxim is decidedly not the case.
Toronto is a prime example. After a surge in the 1980s, the Toronto market peaked in 1989 and didn’t regain that high until 2002 – more than a decade later. A 1995 peak in Vancouver was the high-water mark until eight years later. In the United States, it took a decade after the 2006 peak before that level was seen again.
Each example is different yet each shares central elements, from burst bubbles after manias to the gyration of interest rates and economic woes. What’s clear is real estate can go sideways for a long time, even if everyone believes the natural direction is up.
As Canada works to build a path to housing affordability, the most important thing is new supply – a lot of new homes. But just as important is changing the culture, the mindset that prices are destined to escalate.
Housing has long been expensive but the situation is now extreme. Five years ago, about 60 per cent of households could afford a condo. Last year, it was less than half. And that’s for a condo.
After many years of dizzying gains in the price to buy or rent a home, it’s become widely clear that higher and higher isn’t ideal and comes with many costs.
How to restore some semblance of affordability has shot to the centre of the political debate. This week, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., which has called for millions of new homes, held a conference on the question in Ottawa. The Globe on Wednesday illuminated how we got here in a series of charts, from record-low rental vacancies to the way-too-long time it takes to get new housing approved and built.
Many new homes are needed, yes. As this space showed last week, a burst of construction in booming Austin, Tex., has helped reduce the price to rent.
The shift in entrenched philosophy is also necessary. We need to rein in the housing market mindset that up is good, so pervasive in North America.
The mentality leads to speculation, starting with many families betting on the ever-rising value of their home as a pot of retirement savings. Generation Squeeze, an advocacy group for younger Canadians, puts it this way: “break the addiction to high home values.”
The celebration of higher home prices is deeply ingrained. Ownership in Canada peaked in 2011 at almost seven out of 10 households. Almost all political leaders own their homes and many are landlords. That’s the reason that as things started spinning out of control in the 2010s, blame was first cast on factors such as foreigners or investor speculation without grappling with the real problem: not enough housing.
In each example of real estate markets going sideways for a long time, Toronto, Vancouver, the U.S., it was always considered bad news. The Wall Street Journal lamented Austin’s shift from “America’s hottest housing market” to “running in reverse.”
The bigger goal is to rein in prices, bring them closer to people’s incomes.
The Teranet-National Bank house price index shows the price of housing rose 4.2 per cent annually from 2000 to this year, excluding inflation. Household incomes, according to Statistics Canada, rose by far less, about 1.2 per cent a year from 2000 through 2021.
The goal of a steady surge of new supply would be to establish a lasting buyer’s market. Critics of new supply will often say it won’t ease prices but big housing investors specifically warn shareholders that “competition for residents” and an “oversupply” of homes will affect the prices they charge.
Instead of hoping and cheering prices will someday soon recoup and exceed previous highs, the target has to shift to an extended, and welcome, period of nominal gains. If home prices this century had risen at only the rate of inflation, they would be less than half of what they are – and at levels last seen in 2006. Beyond a return to affordability, a market that offered such nominal returns is what would undercut and eventually end housing speculation.
Decades of culture and policy got us here. It will take time to restore affordability. It will take time to change the culture. But as Canada sets the initial foundations to allow for many more new homes, it is starting on the path to affordability.
Canadian home prices were flat in February after falling for five straight months, a potential sign that the country’s housing market may be rebounding after last year’s slump.
The national home price index, which excludes the highest priced properties, was $719,400 last month, which was the same as in January, according to the Canadian Real Estate Association or CREA.
The last time the home price index rose was from July to August last year, a month after the Bank of Canada shocked the market with back-to-back interest rate hikes. The surprise move had led to a slowdown in sales and a drop in home prices as many would-be homebuyers had a tougher time qualifying for a large enough mortgage to make a purchase.
But now that the central bank has kept its benchmark interest rate steady at 5 per cent for more than six months, would-be buyers are starting to gain confidence that borrowing costs will no longer continue to rise. Prospective buyers who delayed their purchases last year are starting to look again and make bids. The real estate industry said there is pent up demand after months of lacklustre activity.
“People are itching to get going,” said Samantha Villiard, regional vice president for RE/MAX real estate agency. “More people are slowly getting comfortable getting back into the market,” she said.
Realtors have reported an increase in showings and bids in areas that experienced heavy competition during the pandemic’s real estate boom. That includes the suburbs of Toronto and Chilliwack, inland of Vancouver. Over the past month, the home price index rose in Oakville, Milton, Hamilton and Burlington, as well as Chilliwack.
At the same time, the home price index continued to fall in other markets that overheated when interest rates were nearly zero. That includes some parts of Ontario’s cottage country and less populated cities like Guelph.
Across the country, home sales fell 3.1 per cent from January to February after removing seasonal influences. B.C. and Ontario, the country’s largest real estate markets, led the way down with homes sales declining 7 per cent month over month in both. That followed a flurry of sales in December and January. Last month’s volume of sales is still higher than in the fall when homebuyers were still adjusting to the higher interest rates.
TD economist Rishi Sondhi said that activity is still below pre-pandemic days due to lower sales in Ontario, B.C. and Quebec. “This suggests that significant pent-up demand remains in these markets,” he said in a research note.
New listings rose 1.6 per cent from January to February with more homeowners putting their properties up for sale in B.C. and Alberta.
Editor’s note: This article has been update to clarify that Chilliwack is located inland of Vancouver.
The international student visa cap announced by Immigration Minister Marc Miller on Jan. 22 has had students and learning institutions in a frenzy regarding their futures.
The cap will limit the number of international students who can enter Canada over two years and slash 35 per cent of the total number of accepted visas. The cap will also lead to a wider dispersion of international students across the country, as Ontario is currently overflowing with them. The province will see a cut of half of its current visa allotment.
Despite this, many international student and immigration consulting businesses feel that this policy change was necessary to combat problems with the industry. Many international students who eventually come to Canada use private services that support them through school and visa application processes.
However, some recruitment agencies abroad and some learning institutions within Canada have taken advantage of the previous permit rules, leaving licensed consulting businesses frustrated.
Some of the country’s main issues regarding international students stem from recruitment agencies abroad, explained Faustina Kalaci, the president of Aportunita, a Toronto-based consulting business.
Kalaci said that learning institutions often hire licensed agents to help with recruitment and ensure that students meet guidelines. Generally, these agents have a focus on a specific region, such as Southeast Asia.
“Very rarely will you have an agency recruiting students from all over the world for one institution. Different agents will target different demographics,” Kalaci said.
According to Kalaci, this process has changed in recent years, with some institutions turning toward the services of recruiters abroad, many of whom are not licensed immigration practitioners.
‘They just apply to the educational institutions for candidates in hopes that they will be accepted. They work on what we call a conveyor belt . . . They are flooding the system.’
— Faustina Kalaci, president of Aportunita, a Toronto-based consulting business
“They just apply to the educational institutions for candidates in hopes that they will be accepted,” she said. “They work on what we call a conveyor belt…They are flooding the system.”
This means an influx of lower-quality applications are being sent to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. Kalaci explained how services like Aportunita’s ensure students have enough financial capital to support themselves. She explained that recruiters abroad will not make this consideration.
“They don’t care that these students come to Canada and whether they can afford to pay the tuition, room and board,” Kalaci said. “They just get them accepted into schools and hope that as long as they have the money in their bank account, regardless of where their money came from, they can make it. That’s what’s wrong with the system right now.”
Many issues that have sprung up regarding international students in Canada over recent years result from this problem.
“They cannot pay their tuition fees. They end up working illegally,” Kalaci said. “They end up applying for refugee claims, or they barely scrape by, and they end up going to our soup kitchens.”
According to Monique Myers, the CEO of Canstudy Consulting, the federally-imposed cap on international visas will likely require applicants to exceed the minimum expectations for applications now.
“We’ll be seeing a situation where students will need to far surpass the minimum requirements in order to receive a spot in their program of choice,” Myers explained.
She added that this could bring new challenges to the industry.
“This will make it hard for us to advise students as we won’t know when their profile is strong or weak for a particular program.”
Another issue that has led to the cap comes from the actions of universities and colleges themselves, according to Shafoli Kapur, a regulated Canadian immigration consultant who founded TDOT Immigration in 2018.
Kapur explained how institutions such as Niagara College and Cambrian College will issue more spaces to international students who apply than the number of allocations available. This is because institutions do not know how many students will be granted visas during application times.
“They still want to keep their classes full, or their number of people coming that term…so they would overissue the letters of acceptance.”
– Shafoli Kapur, TDOT Immigration
In some circumstances, these institutions are left with extra students who received letters of acceptance and have also been approved for a student visa.
“The extra students that got approved…even if they had paid the fees in full… (would be left) with doubts,” Kapur said. “They didn’t know what to do or where to go. Some of them had already booked their tickets. Now they don’t know if they can come or they can’t come… They didn’t know what to really do.”
Overall, Kapur believes the cap is a change that needed to be made.
“There is so much demand for Canada. It’s the survival of the fittest at this point.”