
Bank of Canada Debated Whether to Hike or Hold in January
Bank of Canada officials debated holding rates or hiking by another quarter percentage point at their January decision, according to a summary of their deliberations.
Latest Videos
The information you requested is not available at this time, please check back again soon.
Bank of Canada officials debated holding rates or hiking by another quarter percentage point at their January decision, according to a summary of their deliberations.
The booming Phoenix hospitality sector is poised for another win as it hosts the Super Bowl between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs this Sunday.
Evidence of falling prices in Sweden’s commercial real estate sector is starting to pile up as landlords slash the valuations of their portfolios.
The Riksbank will probably raise its interest rate by a half point this week, staring down the mounting danger of an economic slump to act against rampant inflation.
Britain’s housing market may be showing tentative signs of improvement after a brutal 2022.
Jul 15, 2022
Bloomberg News
,Canadian home prices saw their biggest monthly decline in at least 17 years as the impact of higher interest rates began to spread across the country.
The benchmark price of a home fell 1.9 per cent in June versus the previous month, according to data released Friday by the Canadian Real Estate Association. That’s the third straight month of falling prices, and the biggest one-time drop in data going back to 2005.
With inflation running at the highest level since the early 1980s, the Bank of Canada has rapidly increased the cost of borrowing, boosting its policy rate to 2.5 per cent from 0.25 per cent since the beginning of March. That has caused an abrupt turn in the market as more buyers find themselves unable to secure financing. Sales fell 5.6 per cent on a monthly basis in June.
Greater Toronto, the country’s largest city and the center of its financial industry, has seen benchmark prices fall 4.5 per cent in three months to $1.21 million (about US$928,000). But the declines are steepest in the cities and towns around Toronto that gained the most during the COVID-19 pandemic as people used the freedom of remote work to move further away.
Oakville, a western suburb, has seen a 10 per cent price drop in the last three months, while prices in the city of London, Ontario, about a two-hour drive away, have declined 13 per cent.
The downturn is becoming more broadly based. In Winnipeg, prices dropped 2.4 per cent in June. They also fell in Vancouver and its outlying suburbs, Edmonton and Halifax.
In Montreal, prices fell 1.3 per cent. “It has slowed down gradually since November,” Daren King, an economist at National Bank of Canada, said in an interview.
The market in Canada’s second-largest city is “a lot less brutal” than some other locations because it’s more affordable and housing supply is still very tight, King said. Even so, the bank forecasts that prices will sink about 10 per cent in Montreal and 15 per cent in Toronto by the end of 2023, he said.
Nationally, the June price decline was an acceleration from the 0.5 per cent drop seen in May and a 1 per cent fall in April.
It’s the first time since 2019 that national home prices have fallen for three consecutive months, though the soft patch is coming after a record-breaking two years for the Canadian housing market in which the benchmark price jumped 50 per cent.