Ben Myers – Toronto Sun

Fortress Real Developments conducts a robust investigation of the health of the Canadian housing market twice a year. The findings are summarized in a report called The Market Manuscript.

We make the report available to download for free on our website as well as distributing it to our developer partners, to individuals that invest in Fortress projects, and to investors that have bought homes at our developments. My goal with this report is to bring together several forecasts from top analysts and economists, and debunk many of the flawed findings that grab national attention.

A frequent topic of discussion among our partners and clients is the barrage of conclusions that the Canadian housing market is overvalued.

For example, recent reports have suggested that Canadian houses are overvalued by up to 63%! That number was a bit unbelievable to me, so I took a hard look at the topic in the spring 2015 Market Manuscript.

I found that conclusions are often based on price-to-rent and price-to-income ratio studies. These studies, according to the Bank of Canada, are popular because they are simple to construct and easy to compare across countries.

But the Bank also concluded that these studies are misleading, because they ignore interest rate changes and the differences in data definitions, demographic factors and government regulation.

I think these studies are too simplistic, but I wanted to see if other top Canadian analysts did, too.

I emailed a number of top economists an online survey, and asked them which ratio was the best at predicting future house price movements in our country.

Interestingly 94% of respondents clicked ‘none of the above’: that no simple ratio study has the power to predict prices.

RBC Global Asset Management came to the same conclusion. They concluded that the best available measure of determining value in the Canadian housing market is the ‘average house price to average monthly carrying-cost ratio’.

Comment: Which is what I have been saying for years.

This ratio takes into consideration the low cost of borrowing.

When using this method, they concluded that a home financed with a variable-rate mortgage in Canada is actually 4% cheaper than it should be!

Whether or not we think Canadian housing is valued correctly or not, the most respected real estate analysts in Canada expect prices to increase nationally in 2015.

Please don’t base the biggest purchase of your life on these misleading reports.

If you can afford it and you love it, buy a new home this year.

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Contact Laurin Jeffrey for more information – 416-388-1960

Laurin Jeffrey is a Toronto real estate agent with Century 21 Regal Realty.
He did not write these articles, he just reproduces them here for people who
are interested in Toronto real estate. He does not work for any builders.
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