The Bank of Canada today maintained its target for the overnight rate at the effective lower bound of ¼ percent, with the Bank Rate at ½ percent and the deposit rate at ¼ percent. The Bank is maintaining its extraordinary forward guidance, reinforced and supplemented by its quantitative easing (QE) program. The Bank is recalibrating the QE program to shift purchases towards longer-term bonds, which have more direct influence on the borrowing rates that are most important... [read more]

REALTOR® associations from Canada’s largest real estate markets are calling on all levels of government to take meaningful action to make home ownership more accessible to people across the country. With a federal election on October 21, the Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver real estate boards, together with the Quebec Professional Association of Real Estate Brokers, the REALTORS® Association of Edmonton and the Nova Scotia Association of REALTORS® are urging the... [read more]

Starting Jan.1, home buyers faced a new challenge in addition to rising prices and a restricted supply of available homes — a mortgage stress test designed to cool the overheated housing markets. The test, introduced by the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OFSI), requires the qualifying rate for an uninsured mortgage to be the greater of the Bank of Canada’s five-year benchmark rate (currently sitting at 4.99 per cent) or the rate homebuyers negotiate... [read more]

A booming Canadian economy has prompted the Bank of Canada to hike its lending rate a quarter of a point for the third time since last summer. In the near-term, it will likely mean some belt-tightening among those with variable rate mortgages and lines of credit, and with more increases expected, some consumers will be scrimping further as the year goes on. But the demand for housing in the Toronto region remains so strong that the higher mortgage rates aren’t expected to have a... [read more]