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How could house-poor Canadians, already saddled with alarming levels of consumer debt, manage their way through this, let alone out the other side?
But they did. And it was, quite frankly, astonishing.
According to CMHC, Canadians deferred $1 billion worth of mortgages per month during the pandemic, while the Canadian Bankers Association reports that more than 760,000 Canadians either skipped a mortgage payment or took advantage of a deferral program.
As of Sept. 13, more than $78 billion had been paid out to Canadians in the form of the Canada Emergency Response Benefit.
Yet, by the time the emergency lockdown restrictions started to relax, the real estate market was in full swing.
The June and July sales figures broke records set a year earlier, and the Toronto market spread its heat to the suburban and rural markets. In cottage country, properties were selling with multiple offers just hours after hitting the market.
Could this really just be the result of pent-up demand? Of fundamental changes in consumer appetites? A hunger for more space, more land, less density?
There were tons of theories.
Maybe all along we haven’t fully appreciated the level of demand, I wondered.
Maybe people weren’t as hurt by lost earnings as one might have expected?
Maybe the busy summer was the combined effect of insatiable demand met with people hustling to get set up to more comfortably ride out the fall’s all but guaranteed second wave.
