Why you can’t afford a house in New York, Hong Kong…and Toronto?

Read the original article here: 

http://news.buzzbuzzhome.com/2017/11/dream-canadian-homeownership-danger-cmhc.html

TRANSCRIPT: 

Speaker 1: This article is from BuzzBuzzHome and the headline is The Dream of Canadian Homeownership is in Danger according to CMHC. The homeownership rate is starting to come down across the country. From 2011 to 2016, the rate came down slightly. What’s interesting is that most of that is probably just happening in Vancouver and Toronto. I think the dream of homeownership, as long as you don’t live in Vancouver or Toronto if you’re Canadian is alive and well. It would be interesting if we would ever see an article like this that said The Dream of Homeownership for New Yorkers is Fading. We probably wouldn’t see that headline. Or Hong Kong or London, any major city in the world, we probably wouldn’t see a similar headline because we accept and we know that these are major world cities. They’re very expensive. They’re expensive cities to live in and they’re very expensive cities if you want to buy and own real estate in.

We assume that most people in those cities are renters. Again, as Canadians we often are looking down at ourselves and Torontonians, we don’t see ourselves as we actually are, as the rest of the world sees us. We are a major city. We’re a global city. We’re becoming more and more so. Ask anybody who lives in London or Hong Kong or New York if they wish they had invested in real estate and the ’80s or ’90s. I think you know where I’m going with this, I mean obviously it was the dream of homeownership was much more attainable in the past than it was today. This is the normal trend that we expect to continue in cities like Toronto and Vancouver.

And this is exactly why we’re investing in these cities today, especially in Toronto and downtown Toronto because we know that prices are going to continue to rise, affordability going to continue to drop and there’s going to be more and more people that are going to be forced into renting in these cities, which is going to continue to drive up rental rates. It’s also going to continue to make housing, from an ownership perspective, even more and more of a scarce thing for fewer and fewer exclusive few, which is just going to continue to drive those prices up as well. I hope you enjoyed this and I hope you found it useful. And until next time, we’ll talk to you soon.