Buying a house may remain out of reach for many Canadians for the foreseeable future, with mortgage costs unlikely to fall enough to offset lofty home prices and weak spending power, economists and real estate agents say. 0 Even with expectations that Bank of Canada will keep cutting rates in the coming months, the issue of home affordability - which has strangled Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s poll numbers - is unlikely to fade before the next election.
The mandate for the Liberal minority government ends at the end of October 2025, but an election could come well before then, with the Conservative opposition spoiling to end Trudeau’s nine-year run at the top.
“You won’t get back to an affordable range for housing on a sustained basis for a decade,” Tony Stillo, director at forecasting and analysis group Oxford Economics, said last week at a conference.
Well yeah, prices quickly took up the slack given by the lowered interest rates and costs during the pandemic. People bid as high as they could, as they typically do. Increasing the interest rates was slower and it takes longer to trickle through the market. Prices did decrease from the peak but it seems that people are holding for dear life and were able to absorb the increased costs at renewal. That peak will have to renew in 2027 but it’s likely to happen at significantly lower interest rates than today. Perhaps if the rates stayed at their highest levels for longer, unsustainable purchases would have been forced to sell. But now rates are already going down and expected to go further down. So everyone who could afford the higher cost is no longer afraid it’s gonna go higher and are less likely to sell. So prices ain’t going down. Then on the other side, buyers are paying more for everything else so rate cuts won’t leave enough money for them to bid as high as they used to at the same interest rates. Unless their incomes catch up. Which has been happening in some sectors and at union shops. Still that’s likely to take longer so without some major affordable housing buildouts I bet the market is gonna keep going sideways for a while. Not going down significantly, not going up by much either.