Canadian homebuyers will face a tougher mortgage stress test starting next week, one that will reduce their buying power and possibly contribute to a cooling of the market that’s already in progress.  Read more here  

David Rosenberg, Chief Economist at Rosenberg Research, talks housing bubbles with BNN.

The decision between a fixed and a variable rate is never easy.  Are rates going up?  Are they going down?  What is the Bank of Canada doing?  What is the economy going to do?  David Larock provides an excellent viewpoint of the current situation.  Might help in your decision making.

The last guidance from the Bank of Canada suggests that mortgage rates are going to stay low in the near term meaning the next 12 to 18 months. A couple of important indicators, especially in the fixed rate market suggests that there is a distinct possibility that fixed rates will begin to rise and could […]

As expected by the majority analysis, the Bank of Canada (BoC) kept its key policy rate unchanged at its first meeting of 2021. The target overnight rate will be maintained at 0.25% where it has been since the beginning of the pandemic. This will keep the majority of bank’s prime rates at 2.45% and subsequently […]

The interest rate of your fixed rate mortgage is directly tied to the cost of the money that the bank loans to you. Banks have many different ways to borrow money which they then loan to consumers, the most basic way they do this is accepting your deposits and paying you interest on your deposit […]

For all borrowers one of the key decisions when choosing a mortgage product is whether to choose a variable or fixed rate mortgage. With one lender having recently offered a 0.99% variable rate mortgage it is perhaps worthwhile to look at the pros and cons of the variable rate mortgage. Variable rate mortgages are tied […]

There are certain ideals and values I have always tried to bring to my business endeavours and Chapman’s Ice Cream recent decisions to maintain pandemic related pay increases, donate freezers and keeping its employees on the payroll after a fire at their manufacturing plant is the embodiment of those ideals.   Please note, they did not […]

All mortgage contracts have a penalty for prepaying the entirety of the mortgage early. For people seduced by some of the extremely low rate mortgages available these can be extremely high, up to 3% per annum of the remaining balance for the remaining term. The standard language for fixed rate mortgages is the higher of […]

According to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation analyst Lukas Jasmin-Tucci, while there is evidence in the last two quarters that price acceleration in the Montreal market is problematic and that there is now moderate overheating of the market, overvaluation of the market remains low.  There is a caveat to this statement in that house prices […]