When people picture red-hot real estate markets, they most likely think of soaring prices for the condos dotting Vancouver’s skyline. They might also conjure up the bidding wars for massive mega-mansions in and around Toronto.
But they’re likely not thinking about properties Barb Armstrong’s quiet bungalow in picturesque Perth Ont., about an hour southwest of Ottawa.
Even so, Armstrong’s four bedroom, three-bath home was swept up into a bidding war worthy of any big city this month. It sold for $150,000 over her asking price of $529,900 —and the offer didn’t come with any conditions.
“It was quite a shock to see that that amount of money was coming our way for sure,” she said. “It was over our expectation and we were really blown away.”
Armstrong and her husband were lukewarm on selling at first, but a realtor friend explained how hot the local real estate market had become, with families from Ottawa and even as far away as Toronto drawn to Perth by its comparative affordability and bucolic lifestyle.
“We thought, ‘Well, jeepers, maybe we should go for it now,” Armstrong said. The couple listed their home in mid March. Thirty-five viewings later, they had 11 offers on the table. She says she feels like they won the lottery.
WATCH | Barb Armstrong describes the frenzy of offer night:
Barb Armstrong describes what it was like to sell her home in Perth, Ontario, recently, a frenzied process that ended up with here selling her home for $150,000 more than she was anticipating getting. 0:52
Half a country away, on Vancouver Island, Lars Reese-Hansen isn’t surprised to hear about buyers taking their best shot at getting into the market, however they can. He sold his 60s-era single family home in the Comox Valley last fall, and planned to buy elsewhere in B.C. this spring.
He’s looking to downsize into something newer with less maintenance as he heads into retirement but he can’t find anything that fits the bill, even though he’s casting a wide net and is willing to compromise.
“Most of the places that I requested to view are sold before I actually get a foot out the door,” he said.
Reese-Hansen recently lined up four newly listed homes to see that he thought had potential. Just as he hopped in the car to drive down the highway to see them, his realtor called to say they were already gone.
Record high prices
Canada’s housing market is indeed flush with cash at the moment, with the national average selling price hitting an all-time high of $678,091 in February. That’s up more than 25 per cent from the same month last year, pre-pandemic.
While there’s a perception that high prices are mostly a problem in big cities like Toronto and Vancouver, sales are booming just about everywhere, with bully offers becoming the norm.
Paul Martin, president of the Rideau St Lawrence Real Estate Board that covers Perth, Ont., where the Armstrongs live, says “the market just took off,” last year.
“We’ve seen our property prices jump close to 50 per cent in the area,” he said.
About a third of the new buyers are from Toronto, he says, despite the region being about three hours from the city. About half are from Ottawa, which is closer but still up to an hour away.
Realtor Paul Martin, who has been selling homes in the corridor between Toronto and Ottawa for more than 30 years, says he’s never seen anything like what’s happening right now. (Brian Morris/CBC)
One of the area’s major draws is extra space as more people ponder permanently working from home.
Underpinning the frenzy are record low interest rates, which are lower than they’ve ever been, built on the back of Canada’s central bank slashing its lending rate to practically zero to stimulate the economy out of COVID-19.
Pandemic exacerbated pre-existing problems
Economist Mike Moffatt, senior director at the Smart Prosperity Institute, an Ottawa-based think-tank, says low mortgage rates are key to what’s happening, but they’re not the only factor.
If it were just cheap lending, markets should be heating up fairly evenly across the country. But they’re not. Some smaller towns an hour or more outside the orbit of large urban centres are faring better in real estate than some big cities.
Though he lives in Ottawa, Moffatt hails from southwestern Ontario and he says affordability issues were a problem there even before the pandemic because of supply and demand issues. The area’s population was increasing largely from new immigrants and foreign students, and now pandemic-era low rates have poured gasoline on those fires.
“Cottage country places in southwestern Ontario — Woodstock, Ingersoll, Tillsonburg — those are the places seeing the big price increases,” he said.
The numbers back that up. According to data from the Canadian Real Estate Association, prices in Owen Sound are up by 29 per cent in the year up to February 2021. They’re up 39 per cent in Tillsonburg, by 36 per cent in Woodstock, and by 26 per cent in Guelph. All those markets have fared better than the Greater Toronto Area, where CREA’s House Price Index has risen by about 14 per cent in the same time frame.
“It’s fuelled by that the coupling of white-collar professionals who have a lot of money right now and globally low interest rates.”
WATCH | Mike Moffatt explains why a hot housing market is bad for the economy:
Economist Mike Moffatt says high house prices are great for existing owners, but could be bad news for Canada’s economy overall if new buyers are priced out. 0:26
Buyers in small towns are finding themselves priced out of their own markets because local salaries can’t compete with the buying power of out-of-towners.
“We’re going to have a lot of both political and economic problems if we price an entire generation of young families from ever owning a home,” Moffatt said.
Back in B.C., the frenzy is so great that some people are resorting to buying without ever setting foot in their new homes. That’s what happened to Ean Jackson and his wife Sibylle Tinsel. They recently sold their home in Vancouver and were looking to downsize somewhere farther afield.
The couple settled on the tiny community of Powell River, B.C., about 100 kilometres up the coast. They have friends in the area so it was always a long-term plan, but their home sale sped up their timeline.
There were few houses available when they started looking, and what was there was hard to see given pandemic restrictions. “We couldn’t get up there in time to even see the place,” Jackson said in an interview.
So they did what millions of Canadians did while shopping for consumer goods this year — they shopped online and hoped for the best.
Vancouverites Ean Jackson and Sibylle Tinsel recently sold their home and hoped to downsize to a smaller town, but were surprised by the lack of inventory and prices in a hot market. (Mike Zimmer/CBC)
Their realtor was able to give them a walkthrough of the interior and exterior via video, and they liked what they saw enough to put down an offer.
Though they are excited for this new chapter, it “all feels very awkward,” Jackson said.
“It feels really strange. And we look at each other at dinner time just about every night and say, ‘Did we do the right thing? … Did we get ripped off? Or is this going to work out?”
Ultimately Jackson says he knows the answer to that last question is yes because they love what the area has to offer, but he does feel for new young families trying to buy in at current levels.
“You save up for three or four years, you get the price that you think, and then the house just got twice as expensive,” he said.
“I can’t see this lasting, though. It’s got to end sometime.”
TORONTO – Roots Corp. may have built its brand on all things comfy and cosy, but its CEO says activewear is now “really becoming a core part” of the brand.
The category, which at Roots spans leggings, tracksuits, sports bras and bike shorts, has seen such sustained double-digit growth that Meghan Roach plans to make it a key part of the business’ future.
“It’s an area … you will see us continue to expand upon,” she told analysts on a Friday call.
The Toronto-based retailer’s push into activewear has taken shape over many years and included several turns as the official designer and supplier of Team Canada’s Olympic uniform.
But consumers have had plenty of choice when it comes to workout gear and other apparel suited to their sporting needs. On top of the slew of athletic brands like Nike and Adidas, shoppers have also gravitated toward Lululemon Athletica Inc., Alo and Vuori, ramping up competition in the activewear category.
Roach feels Roots’ toehold in the category stems from the fit, feel and following its merchandise has cultivated.
“Our product really resonates with (shoppers) because you can wear it through multiple different use cases and occasions,” she said.
“We’ve been seeing customers come back again and again for some of these core products in our activewear collection.”
Her remarks came the same day as Roots revealed it lost $5.2 million in its latest quarter compared with a loss of $5.3 million in the same quarter last year.
The company said the second-quarter loss amounted to 13 cents per diluted share for the quarter ended Aug. 3, the same as a year earlier.
In presenting the results, Roach reminded analysts that the first half of the year is usually “seasonally small,” representing just 30 per cent of the company’s annual sales.
Sales for the second quarter totalled $47.7 million, down from $49.4 million in the same quarter last year.
The move lower came as direct-to-consumer sales amounted to $36.4 million, down from $37.1 million a year earlier, as comparable sales edged down 0.2 per cent.
The numbers reflect the fact that Roots continued to grapple with inventory challenges in the company’s Cooper fleece line that first cropped up in its previous quarter.
Roots recently began to use artificial intelligence to assist with daily inventory replenishments and said more tools helping with allocation will go live in the next quarter.
Beyond that time period, the company intends to keep exploring AI and renovate more of its stores.
It will also re-evaluate its design ranks.
Roots announced Friday that chief product officer Karuna Scheinfeld has stepped down.
Rather than fill the role, the company plans to hire senior level design talent with international experience in the outdoor and activewear sectors who will take on tasks previously done by the chief product officer.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 13, 2024.
OTTAWA – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Ukraine should be allowed to strike deep inside Russia, regardless of Moscow threatening that this would draw Canada and its allies into direct war.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that the NATO military alliance would draw itself into war if it allows Ukraine to use donated weapons to make long-range strikes inside Russia.
His comments come five weeks after Ukrainian forces stormed the border and put parts of Russian territory under foreign occupation for the first time since the Second World War.
Trudeau says Canada “fully supports Ukraine using long-range weaponry” to prevent Russian strikes on hospitals and daycares across the country.
He says Ukraine must win in fighting back against Russia’s invasion, or it will encourage other large countries to try absorbing their neighbours.
In May, Washington began allowing Ukraine to use American weaponry to strike inside Russia, but only for targets near the border being used to attack Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv.
“Canada fully supports Ukraine using long-range weaponry to prevent and interdict Russia’s continued ability to degrade Ukrainian civilians (and) infrastructure, and mostly to kill innocent civilians in their unjust war,” Trudeau told reporters at a news conference in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Que., on Friday.
“(Putin) is trying to deeply destabilize the international rules-based order that protects us all, not just in every democracy around the world, but in all countries around the world,” Trudeau said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 13, 2024.
OTTAWA – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the NDP is caving to political pressure from Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre when it comes to their stance on the consumer carbon price.
Trudeau says he believes Jagmeet Singh and the NDP care about the environment, but it’s “increasingly obvious” that they have “no idea” what to do about climate change.
On Thursday, Singh said the NDP is working on a plan that wouldn’t put the burden of fighting climate change on the backs of workers, but wouldn’t say if that plan would include a consumer carbon price.
Singh’s noncommittal position comes as the NDP tries to frame itself as a credible alternative to the Conservatives in the next federal election.
Poilievre responded to that by releasing a video, pointing out that the NDP has voted time and again in favour of the Liberals’ carbon price.
British Columbia Premier David Eby also changed his tune on Thursday, promising that a re-elected NDP government would scrap the long-standing carbon tax and shift the burden to “big polluters,” if the federal government dropped its requirements.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 13, 2024.
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