It's hard to gauge the true potential for a collapse in the Canadian housing market when pundits have been discussing the possibility for years at this point. In fact, I first read an article about Canada's housing bubble in late 2009, during my former life as a tracker of investment newsletter performance at The Hulbert Financial Digest.
I was perusing a kitchen-table publication called The Contrarian's View, whose candid editor once cautioned that he's a rotten stockpicker, when I encountered an excerpt from an article that had originally been published on a popular blog called Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis.
At that time, of course, we were all still reeling from the collapse in the U.S. housing market and eager to extrapolate that experience to high-flying housing markets in other countries.
The aforementioned excerpt showed a listing for a modest mid-century fixer-upper in Vancouver that was listed for CAD1.05 million, or around USD997,000 at the time.
The sad-looking house in that ad, which noted "house is livable" and that the basement had been subdivided into three bedrooms, was all too reminiscent of what had happened in the U.S. just three years earlier, when similarly sad-looking houses in need of TLC were being listed for upwards of $500,000 in the less-fashionable areas of the D.C. suburbs (in other words, my milieu).
However, this listing showed that the price for such a property in Vancouver was roughly double that of what I had previously considered excessive in the D.C. area.
The blog's proprietor, Mike "Mish" Shedlock, warned that prices on such properties would eventually crash 75% or more. And based on that listing alone, I was ready to believe that the implosion was imminent.
But here we are five years later, almost to the day, and the debate between those warning of a hard landing in Canada's real estate market and those hoping for a soft landing continues.
Meanwhile, the price of Canadian real estate has continued to rise.
According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. (CMHC), a government agency that insures residential mortgages, home prices in the U.S. and Canada were at roughly equal levels in 2000, but then diverged soon thereafter.
U.S. housing doubled in price by its peak in 2006, while Canadian housing climbed a more moderate 58% through its peak in mid-2008. During the ensuing Global Financial Crisis, U.S. housing truly crashed, with average prices down 32%, compared to a decline of just 9% for the Canadian market.
Since the downturn, Canadian real estate has been rising from a much higher base, and the resulting gap between the average home price in each country is now huge. According to economists with the Bank of Montreal, at the end of the first quarter, the average price for an existing home in Canada was around USD400,000, while the average home price in the US was around USD250,000.
And that's despite the fact that the Canadian government has tightened mortgage regulations four times in as many years, with further tweaks to lending rules forthcoming.
Nevertheless, proponents of a soft landing for Canadian real estate believe they have demographics on their side, particularly when it comes to immigration.
"Ask any real estate developer in any of Canada's major cities about the risk of overbuilding, and the first line of defense would be immigration and its critical role in supporting demand," economists with CIBC observed.
For instance, CMHC notes that immigrant households accounted for 29% of the increase in home ownership between 2001 and 2011. About 260,000 immigrants arrived in Canada in 2012 and again in 2013, among the highest levels of the past 40 years. In fact, more than one-fifth of Canadians are foreign-born.
"Successive generations of immigrants will make important contributions to housing demand, especially in the larger cities that attract disproportionate numbers of new Canadians," the CMHC said.
But not just any immigrant will do. Fortunately, CIBC's review of Statistics Canada's data shows that more than half of new immigrants are in the coveted 25-year old to 44-year old demographic, the prime age range for household formation.
And this cohort's share of overall immigration has been rising in recent years. And according to CIBC, over the past decade, the number of Canadians aged 20 to 44 has risen 75% faster than their counterparts in the U.S.
Demand from new immigrants does indeed appear to have helped support the increase in housing supply, with the current ratio of housing starts to household formation consistent with its long-term trend.
Of course, the Canadian market varies by region, with Vancouver and Toronto experiencing some of the most eye-popping prices. And that means the eventual turn in the cycle could be harder for some areas than others.
For now, debt-burdened Canadians are still paying on time, with the percentage of residential mortgages three months or more in arrears at just 0.31% during the first quarter, according to the Canadian Bankers Association.
So when will the turn in the cycle finally happen? Probably when the Bank of Canada starts raising rates again. And right now, based on futures data aggregated byBloomberg, traders aren't betting that will happen until late 2015, at the earliest.The central bank's benchmark overnight rate has been stuck at 1% since 2010.
Canadian mortgages differ from U.S. mortgages in that most have rates that are only fixed for five-year terms, though the loan is amortized over a 25-year period. Canadian borrowers have been able to manage their debt successfully in part because rates have remained near historic lows for so long.
But once we enter a rising-rate cycle and mortgages start to reset at higher rates, we'll see whether the soft-landing proponents were right.
This article originally appeared in the Maple Leaf Memo column. Never miss an issue. Sign up to receive Maple Leaf Memo by email.
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