Canada Heading Toward US-Style Housing Crisis

CBC.ca

As the big banks get choosier about who they’ll lend money to in this hot housing market, Canada’s once-small subprime mortgage industry is quietly booming.

The Canadian Real Estate Association released figures Monday showing Canadian home sales rose 2.5 per cent in March, and the average Canadian home sold for $369,677 last month.

That was actually a slight decline from the level of a year ago, but it comes on the heels of almost uninterrupted strong gains over the previous two years.

Fuelling that boom is a growing pile of mortgage debt, an increasing amount of which isn’t coming from Canada’s major lenders. That’s largely because of recent developments at the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.

The CMHC is the Crown corporation mandated to oversee Canada’s housing industry. The vast majority of Canadian mortgages show up on its books, because CMHC insures the mortgages approved by banks.

In 2010 and again in 2011, hoping to slow down a red-hot housing market, the Department of Finance tinkered with the rules surrounding who can qualify for CMHC-insured mortgages. Moves to shorten the maximum length of the mortgage and raise the minimum percentage a borrower must have as a down payment combined to make CMHC insurance harder to come by.

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