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Old Posted Jun 4, 2020, 5:51 PM
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Changing City Changing City is offline
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It's impossible to predict what the long term impact will be. Data on sales of houses are different from sales of condos. There are few houses being put on the market at the moment, so prices haven't dropped much recently, but if you bought a house in the fall of 2017, it's worth about 10% less today than you paid. That's still better than a year ago - when you would have been 13% underwater. Sales in April were still the lowest for that month in the past 20 years.

Condo prices are down less, but more condos have been coming to market in recent weeks - not least because of former short-term rentals. Prices have dropped from the peak (if you look at average dollars per square foot), but not by much yet.

The big unknowns are what will happen in the fall. If immigration doesn't pick up again for a while, while all the current construction gets completed, there will be a lot more units completing with no obvious occupants wanting them.

On the finance side, it looks as if CMHC are going to make it harder (or more expensive) to get a mortgage, and with 15% of mortgages deferred, there are clearly a bunch of owners who are going to struggle if their jobs don't reappear.

Those all suggest downward pressure on prices for a while - but those sorts of prediction have been made before, and been wrong.
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