On February 16, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced new rules that affect mortgage lenders and borrowers starting on April 19 of this year.
One of the changes requires that buyers qualify for their high-ratio mortgage based on the “five-year fixed rate” even if their mortgage payments are actually calculated on an available lower rate. In other [...]
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) released it Canadian Housing Market Outlook for 2010 today predicting residential resale activity across Canada will grow by just less than five percent to 486,700 while new housing starts rise by roughly as much to 175,150. According to CMHC the average price of a resale home in Canada [...]
Remax released it’s 2010 Market Trends Report today stating that “healthy levels” of inventory and demand that is gaining momentum are moving the Saskatoon real estate market towards a “full recovery.”
Other tidbits from the Saskatoon section of the report include the following:
While sales are still off of last year’s numbers average prices continue to edge [...]
Insisting that Canada is not facing a housing bubble, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced a tightening on mortgage lending rules, which he says will “help prevent negative trends from developing.”
Effective April 19, 2010 the following changes will take effect.
Home buyers must qualify for their mortgage using the five-year fixed mortgage rate, regardless of the term [...]
Canada’s Finance Minister, Jim Flaherty will announce this morning a change in lending rules that will further limit the amount of cash buyers can borrow to finance a home according to a report on Globe and Mail.
Stimulus cash, and historically low interest rates have created an enticing environment for Canadian home buyers who have flooded [...]
Competition Commissioner Melanie Aitken has moved to bring the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) before a Competition Tribunal to seek a ruling that would force CREA to change MLS rules that she believes limit competition and harm consumers.
Following a lengthy investigation, the Competition Bureau announced in early November that they believed some of CREA’s rules [...]
The opportunity to take advantage of Canada’s Home Renovation Tax Credit expires at midnight on January 31. Obviously, the clock has run out when it comes to hiring a contractor but a quick trip to your favorite home renovation store might be in order if home improvements are part of your plan over the next [...]
I can’t imagine that it would come as much of a surprise to anyone that the cost of home ownership in Saskatoon has skyrocketed in recent years. According to the recently released “6th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey” owning a Saskatoon home priced at the median in Q3/2009 would have cost about 4.4 times [...]
Saskatoon’s real estate markets saw solid improvements in the final quarter of 2009 across housing types, according to the latest Royal LePage Market Survey Forecast and House Price Survey.
In Saskatoon, standard condominiums sold for an average of $197,500, up 5.9 per cent from the same period last year. Detached bungalows sold for an average of [...]
For the first time since he initially acknowledged concern over a potential bubble in Canadian housing markets, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has openly indicated in an interview for CTV’s Question Period that higher down payments and shorter amortization periods are both on the table “if” there is further evidence of a bubble.
“If we see further [...]
An estimated 30,000 mortgages granted to Canadians with poor credit or insufficient incomes at the height of the Canadian housing boom will not be renewed when they mature over the next three years, according to a story on globeinvestor.com. The sub-prime lenders who granted the loans say that the investors who financed buyers at above [...]
