Toronto & Vancouver Housing Markets Are No Longer Sexy?

So it seems,

Toronto, Vancouver Housing Markets Have ‘Topped Out’: Real Estate Association

And,

TD Bank sees a possible “soft landing.” – huffingtonpost.ca

Sexy House?

Image Source

Is this the consequence of the announcement of of “imminent” tax on vacant homes …?

Vancouver mayor mulls implementing London’s ‘Ghost Home” Tax

Investors sit on thousands of empty homes as more and more people struggle to pay rent. Public sentiment turns against wealthy foreigners, who many say are responsible for surging property values.

There are many parallels between Vancouver’s housing market and the inner-city London borough of Camden, said Councillor Theo Blackwell, who oversees the finance portfolio for the district.

“There was a suspicion that quite a lot of these people or overseas companies were using Camden’s property like gold bricks, basically,” Mr. Blackwell said in an interview last week.

In 2013, he helped implement a tax on empty “ghost homes” that has since been mimicked in other parts of London and is now being embraced by Vancouver’s mayor as a way to bolster his city’s 0.6-per-cent rental vacancy rate.

Mayor Gregor Robertson issued an Aug. 1 ultimatum to the province last week, saying Vancouver would go it alone if the government refused to start implementing the idea. On Wednesday, city council voted to approve this adversarial approach, despite staff from both city hall and the provincial Finance Ministry meeting throughout this week to see if the proposal will work.

Supporters say the tax is a valuable tool in the fight to make housing more affordable when the world’s richest people increasingly seek to profit from real estate. But critics argue that the tactic is too much work for authorities and has little overall effect on a superheated market.

Read more at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Many seem to think Canadian real estate may not crash, but the end is nigh for real estate super-hotness. At least it is no longer that sexy … So said the pundits:-

Why Vancouver housing may have hit its dot-com bubble peak

bnn.ca – ‎Jul 11, 2016‎

Last month, Finance Minister Bill Morneau launched a working group of officials from the governments of Canada, Ontario, B.C.

In fact, sexiness is already out of the question in the rest of the regions in Canada …

Saskatoon realtor calls city’s housing market ‘soft’

CBC.ca – ‎Jul 11, 2016‎

Fisher said that the best deals can be found in the condo market. “There is lots of selection and there is few people buying, so as a buyer you are definitely going to be able to make a better deal there,” he added.

Hold on a sec …

Number of million-dollar houses in town up 30 per cent in one year

Ottawa Citizen – ‎Jul 10, 2016‎

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. does surveys on new home construction in several Canadian cities. For new … The market may have taken a breather, as the CMHC survey for May 2016 puts the figure at $505,127 for a single detached.