February 15th approaching very quickly as the down payment requirement for homes between 499,000 and 999,999 dollars will require a bigger down payment. This change is said to only affect a few parts of the country that the government will be targeting to try and slow down. Is it too little too late if that was the goal intended by this change?
Toronto’s average single family selling price according to TREB’s report was $848999.00 an increase of 11% from 2015 https://www.trebhome.com/market_news/market_watch/
Vancouver is still on fire when it comes to single family sales and reached a new high of $1,273,100.00 in January of 2016 a staggering increase of 25.9% over January 2015
The new rules will have little or no effect on the rule change as all of these sales would require a minimum 20% down on the million portion and a staggered percentage on the remaining amounts. Given the amount of foreign ownership in Vancouver they would have either paid cash or had at least 50% down payment. Their other advantage would be that they paid in USD which gives that buyer a discount of almost 30% on the purchase because of exchange.
Too little too late and no chance of slowing the truly hot markets, I can only think that I would not want to be the last buyer in on these markets and would be looking elsewhere for investment properties…oh wait I hear there are some deals to be had in Calgary.
