Friday, December 23, 2016

Top real estate stories of 2016: House flipping becomes reality, government tries to cool the hot market

What if you kept making the same prediction over and over again and it never came true?

That’s the dilemma for housing naysayers who have been calling for some type of meaningful correction for more than a decade. It hasn’t happened on a national level, unless you consider a 0.7 per cent reduction in prices in 2008 a crash. Individual markets always tell their own story and price reductions are now underway in cities like Vancouver and Calgary.

Even the Canadian Real Estate Association, which represents over 110,000 realtors, now says the housing boom can’t go on. The Ottawa-based group is forecasting housing sales to drop by 3.3 per cent next year after a record 2016.

On the price front, 2016 should see a record average price of $489,500 but CREA says prices will drop 3.3 per cent next year.

What’s changing? The fear of a rising rate environment was starting to materialize late in 2016 – albeit in small way.

The bigger threat seems to be tougher mortgage rules out of Ottawa which will make it even harder for first-time buyers to qualify for a loan and potentially snuff out a housing market that has been on fire for almost a decade and half.



from DIYS http://ift.tt/2hgjMqW

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