In this video, I talk with author and economic analyst John Sneisen about the crashing Toronto real estate market as house prices drop harder than they have in 30 years.
March sales in Toronto dropped 40% from last year, the lowest since 2009. The average selling price for all homes dropped 14% from a year earlier, the biggest drop since 1991.
Detached home prices dropped the most which is notable as condo sales are the only thing that has gone up. There's a reason for that. People can't afford the detached homes anymore, but they are largely downgrading to condos.
The Toronto Real Estate board in a recent report said,
"The share of high-end detached homes selling for over $2 million in March 2018 was half of what was reported in March 2017, further impacting the average selling price."
To top it all off, active listings went up 103.1% since March of 2017. That is a massive rise in homes for sale, a recipe for disaster.
We've been warning about this for a long time. We remember well the euphoria of people in Toronto telling us it would just keep going up forever. The bubble was growing larger and larger. People were looking at their house as an asset. Their eyes became glassy and the hockey stick reached its peak and now we see a massive drop out. We will soon see similar in Vancouver. We reported on BMO's collateralized debt obligations which many of us remember from 2006 and 2007 before the bubble burst.
Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) are packages of a bunch of mortgages, mostly bad mortgages with a few good mortgages. The package is rated by the top few good mortgages, often triple A. That is insane.
The level of derivatives manipulating the markets into temporary prosperity will burst the bubble and cause long term pain.
We need to be self sustainable and not fall for the fake speculation.