Quote:
Originally Posted by Nite
so maybe it's interest that control house prices then and not immigration which only increases demand by 1.5% year.
During the last 3 years prices have gone the opposite direct to the amount of immigrations Canada gets (ie low immigration number and rising house prices and high immigration and falling house prices)
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Lio is on the money here.
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So, as Lio (whose into the real estate market as an investor) knows; there ar multiple factors at play in pricing of housing, as with any good or service.
That said the majority can broadly be explained at the high level by 'supply' and 'demand'. I literally don't have the time to detail how those play out in every respect; but I will try to hit the highlights.
1) Demand is rising, both due to immigration (inclusive of foreign students and TFWs); as well as shrinking household size (fewer people in each home) and financialization of real estate which includes factors such as people buying condos, though sometimes SFH and keeping them off the rental market as a passive holding, as well as flipping through assignment sales, various other measures that serve to constrain supply and inflate price.
In respect of demand growth your grasp of the scale of that growth and its impact is under-sized.
Example one, household size. Average household size in Canada is falling 0.1 every 4 years or so. What's the impact? Watch.
15.3M households divided by average family size. Requirement 9M housing units (rental and ownership) + vacancies/second homes/vacation rentals and cottages.
Drop household size to 0.1 and you need 9,562,000 house units ++
Think about that, you have demand growth over 140,000 units per year based on shrinking household size alone.
Now lets talk population growth. You seem to think growth is 1.5% a year......tis not so. Canada added over 1M to its population last year, that's over 2.7% growth. Roughly, 450,000 'immigrants', + TFWs + Foreign Students + Refugees Asylum seekers + Natural growth. Those 1,050,000 people all need places to live. Lets divide their numbers by a larger than typical Canadian household size (though not universally true as foreign students and many TFWs are singles), conservatively, you need 525,000 additional housing units for just one year.
Adding that to our household demand flow, and you need well over 650,000 housing units just to maintain equilibrium
When you look at the current trend in housing starts in Canada, you see ~ 250,000 per year.
https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/en/professio...-housing-starts-construction-data-tables
In other words, nation-wide, we are building fewer units that new demand each and every year. We have no practical way to even hold balance in the market, because the industry simply can't turn out units much faster than it is.
I know people in the industry and there are worker, equipment and supply shortages. Developers have pipelines, and projects are already delayed not for lack of buyers, but the resources to build.
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Meanwhile, we run into another problem.....the influx of labour restrains wage growth. But the high demand for housing drives up the price.
Thus reducing relative affordability.
If median wage growth were keeping up with housing, we wouldn't have a crisis, but its not. Why is the local Tim Horton's going to pay its cashier $23 per hour when they can import a TFW who will work for $15?
That is exploitive to the TFW by the way or the foreign student we're mooching for 25k for a community college diploma they'll likely never get any use out of..while working the night shift at Tim's through their entire studying years.
Lose-lose. Developers and investors are doing well; but to the detriment of the economy as a whole. We're over-weight real estate and under weight innovation, manufacturing and other value-add.
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