TORONTO – The Toronto Regional Real Estate Board says home sales in June declined 16.4 per cent from last year, with many potential buyers staying on the sidelines despite the highly anticipated Bank of Canada interest rate cut.

The board said 6,213 homes changed hands in the month compared with 7,429 in June of last year.

The average selling price in the Greater Toronto Area was down 1.6 per cent year-over-year to $1,162,167.

TRREB president Jennifer Pearce said the central bank’s 25-basis-point cut last month provided some initial relief for the housing market, but the June sales data “suggests that most homebuyers will require multiple rate cuts before they move off the sidelines.”

The Bank of Canada began its rate-lowering process with a June 5 cut that brought its key interest rate down to 4.75 per cent from five per cent.

Ipsos polling for TRREB indicates that cumulative rate cuts of at least 100 basis points, or a full percentage point, would be required to boost home sales by a meaningful amount.

“It’s got to be a lot more than 25 basis points,” said Vy Ngo, a sales representative with Big City Realty Inc. Brokerage.

Ngo said despite the lack of a significant uptick in buyer demand after the rate cut announcement, it did prompt an influx of supply around the GTA. She said sellers were more optimistic than buyers that the decision would spur a rebound in activity after there was essentially “no spring market” this year.

“I guess all the sellers have been holding off for some time now. Everyone probably had the same idea, like ‘let’s wait till the rate cut,'” she said.

“So literally, as soon as that happened, there was this huge amount of new listings that came to the market.”

There were 23,613 active listings on the market last month, up 67.4 per cent from June 2023. New listings rose 12.3 per cent over the same period, with 17,964 properties put on the market last month.

“The GTA housing market is currently well-supplied. Recent homebuyers have benefited from substantial choice and therefore negotiating power on price,” said TRREB chief market analyst Jason Mercer in a news release.

“Moving forward, as sales pick up alongside lower borrowing costs, elevated inventory levels will help mitigate against a quick run-up in selling prices.”

The City of Toronto saw 2,236 sales in June, a 20.6 per cent decrease from a year ago. Throughout the rest of the GTA, home sales fell 13.8 per cent to 3,977.

All property types saw fewer sales in June compared with a year ago throughout the entire region, led by a 28.1 per cent decline in condo sales.

Sales of townhouses and semi-detached homes fell 14.1 and 11.4 per cent, respectively, along with 10.6 per cent fewer detached properties that changed hands year-over-year.

Ngo said there are advantages to being a buyer amid the current conditions. The surge in supply coupled with less competition than usual for this time of year means those actively searching for their new home could hold negotiating power.

“It’s really hard to time the market,” she said

“I have some that are holding to see where things go, but I do notice more people thinking about this than a couple of months ago.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 4, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Workers in Greece are going to have to work a little bit longer starting this week, with the country introducing a six-day work week for some.

As part of new labour laws passed last year, some Greek workers began a 48-hour work week starting Monday, a move that union representatives from across industries have termed “barbaric.”

The pro-business government of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said the changes are “growth-oriented” and are necessary given the country’s shrinking population and lack of skilled labour — a crisis Mitsotakis has described as a “ticking time bomb.”

However, the move is not finding many takers here in Canada.

“We do have an urgent need to fix Canada’s declining productivity. However, the solution is not necessarily to adopt longer working hours but rather work in a smarter way,” said Diana Palmerin-Velasco, senior director on the future of work at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.

“To increase productivity, we need to enable an innovative economy through regulatory modernization, technological investment and adoption, digital transformation of SMEs, and better skilling and training of our workforce,” Palmerin-Velasco said.

Moshe Lander, economics professor at Concordia University, said Greece appears out of sync.

“The world seems to be going in the opposite direction. We seem to be talking about, how do we get down to a four-day work week? They want to go back to a six-day work week,” he said.

So, what does the law in Canada say about the idea?

Work conditions are set by provincial legislation, but a nation-wide view might come from the Canada Labour Code.

The Canada Labour Code, which oversees federally regulated industries such as banking, transportation, and telecommunications, says “hours of work in a week shall be so scheduled and actually worked that each employee has at least one full day of rest in the week.”

However, it goes on to say that the number of working hours will not exceed eight hours in a day and 40 hours in a week.

Technically, it could be possible to institute a six-day work week but the federal labour code would need to be amended to increase the number of working hours. Provinces with similar rules would have to do the same for the more than 90 per cent of Canadians in non-federally regulated workplaces.

Unions in Canada fought to institute a shorter work week in 1872 and Lander said the five-day work week has not dampened productivity.

“We’ve done about 100 years of a five-day workweek, and up until about the 1980s, we were seeing productivity increase, despite the fact we were working the exact same number of days,” he said.

He said Canada’s loss of productivity in recent years had little to do with the number of days or hours Canadians worked, but more to do with the lack of competition in key sectors such as telecom, airline and retail.

When major Canadian companies have no fear of competition, he says they will not be as incentivized to innovate.

“It’s not that the Canadian worker is fundamentally lazy, it’s just that they’re not induced to work hard because the owners of the businesses that they work for are not afraid that somebody’s going to come steal the business,” he said.

Lander said Canada could leverage its free trade agreements with the United States, Mexico and trade deals with some European and Asian partners to allow more foreign competition for Canadian companies.

“I understand why you would like to see that Canadian flag over some of our businesses, but if that’s going to lead to lower productivity and a lower standard of living, maybe nationalism needs to be put aside,” he said.

He said that more foreign competition in the labour market would also help workers.

“If you only have a limited number of Canadian firms that are willing to hire you for your labor, they have all the power,” he said. “Increased productivity means increased pay.”

Meanwhile, public sector workers in Canada are demanding more flexibility in how they work.

The Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) said in a statement Tuesday that it is ramping up efforts to fight over a three-day in-office mandate.

“PSAC members overwhelmingly oppose the government’s misguided telework mandate. They are rightfully angry that their employer is making unilateral changes to their work environments without justifying the decision with data,” PSAC said in a statement.

The union has promised a “summer of discontent” over the government’s changes.