It’s been over a decade of inflated home prices for Toronto. The phenomenon has locked out millions of would-be homeowners out of the market, most notably the millennial cohort. And now, new data collected by Bloomberg suggests the real estate bubble will burst.
READ: Bank Of Canada Lowers Mortgage Rate For 1st Time In 3 Years
The company recently launched a Housing Bubble Dashboard to track which real estate price bubbles on the international stage show signs of popping. The dashboard takes into account high house price-to-rent and house price-to-income ratios as well as inflation-adjusted prices and household credit. With decreased housing opportunities, renters and buyers are feeling the crunch. So the possibility of the bubble bursting comes as welcome news.
Currently in Toronto, to purchase an average home at around $873,000 a buyer would have to earn within the top 10 per cent of local incomes. That would mean you’d have to be earning a whopping $125,000 to afford a typically-priced, non-luxury home.
But Toronto’s not the only market that will feel the drop. According to Bloomberg associate and Wayfair co-founder and CEO, Niraj Shah, it’s all of Canada and New Zealand. Shah made the dramatic prediction after crunching numbers from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Bank for International Settlement.
Other contributing factors are new actions from the Canadian federal and provincial governments. The Foreign Buyer’s Tax has caused a big drop in real estate purchases and the 2018 mortgage stress test has also slowed purchases across the country.
When you start to examine what a similar price point might get you in other jurisdictions, a change in price may seem terrifying. But now with Shah’s prediction, these discrepancies between communities might show signs of improving.
RBC’s senior economist, Robert Hogue, says he has “seen a bit of cooling off” in both the Vancouver and GTA markets, noting that a gradual price shift is better than a dramatic one.
READ: Toronto Is The No. 1 City Canadians Want To Move To For Real Estate
While Shah says Toronto prices will still remain “substantially elevated”, he notes that the rate cuts from central banks could further the possibility of a pricing drop. Shah had a sense this was coming. He developed Bloomberg’s Housing Bubble Dashboard to monitor international markets in lieu of the global interest rate cuts.
Now millennials’ so-called torture might find its happy ending after all.
