According to a report by Royal LePage’s house price survey, the city’s housing prices have jumped higher than any other city in the country.
The aggregate price of a home in Kingston increased 38.1 per cent year-over-year, reaching $722,100 in the fourth quarter of 2021. While the median price of a single-family detached home increased 44.3 per cent to $780,600.
Nikki McAlpine has been trying to buy a three-bedroom home in the city for more than two years. She wants a bedroom for herself and her husband, one for their young son, and one for her mother, who is now living with them.
“It just makes it really discouraging for people like us,” she says of the market. “We’ve managed to get a lot of debts paid off, and we’ve got an approval now of $400,000 and there’s nothing.”
For a city this size, she’s considering what was once an unthinkable commute.
“We’ve looked within a one-hour radius of Kingston, if we can at least get a home, we’re willing to drive to work and there’s nothing. There’s absolutely nothing,” she says.
The report shows about half of the buyers are coming from outside the region, the majority of them from Toronto, where housing prices are listed as the highest in the country now.
David Gordon, a Queen’s University professor for the School of Urban Planning, says one big factor has been the pandemic. It has workers looking elsewhere for more affordable homes with more space.
“Kingston was always just a little too far, at two-and-a-half hours away, but remote work has made distance a little bit more achievable,” he says.
In Toronto, $400,000 listings include one-bedroom condos in North York. In Ottawa, a four-bed, two-bath attached home is listed in Orléans.
But in Kingston, a house listed at that price includes a three-bed, two-bath detached house in the city’s desirable west end.
The report shows with a small number of houses on the market, there are bidding wars for the ones that are available, driving prices up.
Gordon says Kingston itself has proven to be an attractive draw.
“Kingston has a lot to like; it has one of the best downtowns of any medium city in North America, has a lovely historic core and a terrific waterfront.”
But all of those soaring values leave people like McAlpine out.
“Honestly feels like for someone like myself, first-time homebuyer, decent income, great credit, the good down payment? It shouldn’t be this hard. It really shouldn’t,” she says.
TORONTO – One expert predicts Ottawa‘s changes to mortgage rules will help spur demand among potential homebuyers but says policies aimed at driving new supply are needed to address the “core issues” facing the market.
The federal government’s changes, set to come into force mid-December, include a higher price cap for insured mortgages to allow more people to qualify for a mortgage with less than a 20 per cent down payment.
The government will also expand its 30-year mortgage amortization to include first-time homebuyers buying any type of home, as well as anybody buying a newly built home.
CIBC Capital Markets deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal calls it a “significant” move likely to accelerate the recovery of the housing market, a process already underway as interest rates have begun to fall.
However, he says in a note that policymakers should aim to “prevent that from becoming too much of a good thing” through policies geared toward the supply side.
Tal says the main issue is the lack of supply available to respond to Canada’s rapidly increasing population, particularly in major cities.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 17,2024.
OTTAWA – The Canadian Real Estate Association says the number of homes sold in August fell compared with a year ago as the market remained largely stuck in a holding pattern despite borrowing costs beginning to come down.
The association says the number of homes sold in August fell 2.1 per cent compared with the same month last year.
On a seasonally adjusted month-over-month basis, national home sales edged up 1.3 per cent from July.
CREA senior economist Shaun Cathcart says that with forecasts of lower interest rates throughout the rest of this year and into 2025, “it makes sense that prospective buyers might continue to hold off for improved affordability, especially since prices are still well behaved in most of the country.”
The national average sale price for August amounted to $649,100, a 0.1 per cent increase compared with a year earlier.
The number of newly listed properties was up 1.1 per cent month-over-month.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
MONTREAL – Two Quebec real estate brokers are facing fines and years-long suspensions for submitting bogus offers on homes to drive up prices during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Christine Girouard has been suspended for 14 years and her business partner, Jonathan Dauphinais-Fortin, has been suspended for nine years after Quebec’s authority of real estate brokerage found they used fake bids to get buyers to raise their offers.
Girouard is a well-known broker who previously starred on a Quebec reality show that follows top real estate agents in the province.
She is facing a fine of $50,000, while Dauphinais-Fortin has been fined $10,000.
The two brokers were suspended in May 2023 after La Presse published an article about their practices.
One buyer ended up paying $40,000 more than his initial offer in 2022 after Girouard and Dauphinais-Fortin concocted a second bid on the house he wanted to buy.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2024.
