Safe as houses? How Canada's ailing housing market could spell trouble for the whole economy

Calgary Herald

8 hours ago

Calderwood has built a career specializing in selling luxury real estate from condos to waterfront properties, and she has recently noticed both a decline in sales and prices, as well as a rise in foreclosures.
'It really picked up last year, but this year, too,' she said. 'A lot of foreclosures and then you just see the price dropping. Sometimes people are losing a couple of million.'
Economists and industry insiders say some markets have entered a buyer's market for the first time in years, with cities such as Toronto, Vancouver and even Calgary recording significant drops in sales activity and posting record highs in inventory.
That could be a sign of price bubbles bursting, which is welcome news for would-be buyers, but could also spell trouble for the Canadian economy, which has relied on housing in recent years as an important economic driver, and it could lead to a drag on jobs, government revenues and the stability of the financial system.
The housing market recently peaked in mid-2022, before it started declining as the Bank of Canada began raising interest rates to deal with post-pandemic inflation. Earlier this year, the industry was hoping the market would begin a slow recovery after the central bank began delivering rate relief in 2024. Data from June and July seem to suggest a pickup in activity, but prices and sales are down compared to last year.
Robert Hogue, assistant chief economist at Royal Bank of Canada, projects home resales will decline 3.5 per cent in Canada to 467,100 units in 2025, with the drop largely concentrated in Ontario and British Columbia.
Trade uncertainty and general worries about the Canadian economy have been blamed for the slowdown, but some markets have also become unaffordable for many buyers.
'We have had a structural shift in interest rates,' Charles St-Arnaud, chief economist at Alberta Central, said. 'That changed the affordability equation quite significantly for many markets.'
He said mortgage rates are 150 basis points higher than they were in the decade before the pandemic and that has left a lot of would-be buyers not being able to afford what they thought they could afford.
'That's why we've been seeing prices going nowhere; no one can afford to overbid for a house in aggregate,' he said.
By the numbers
Some politicians like to talk about lowering housing market prices as a social good, but housing and real estate investments remain a key economic driver for Canada and investors need to know they'll get a return on their money.
In May, Canada's newly appointed Housing Minister Gregor Robertson said the quiet part out loud when he was asked whether house prices should go down.
'No, I think that we need to deliver more supply, make sure the market is stable,' he said during a scrum on Parliament Hill. 'It's a huge part of our economy.'
Last year alone, the housing sector contributed $143.4 billion to the economy and supported 1.2 million jobs. Someone buying a home often translates into spin-off consumption in other areas of the economy, such as household appliances, renovation services and materials.
'You've often heard the saying in the U.S. that when the housing market is doing well, the general economy is doing well,' St-Arnaud said. 'Strong housing starts, strong building construction, have a lot of spillover to the rest of the economy.'
Residential investment contributed 10 per cent to Canada's gross domestic product (GDP) in 2021 during the pandemic housing boom and 7.5 per cent in 2023. The total value of housing assets grew to $4.2 trillion last year, representing 25 per cent of national wealth.
The total residential dollar value of all homes sold in Canada in June was $33.1 billion, according to the Canadian Real Estate Association, compared to $25.1 billion in June 2019, which represents a 24 per cent increase in six years. This has been helped by an increase in the average home price, which climbed to $691,634 in June from $505,500 in June 2019.
Mike Moffatt, an economist and founding director of the Missing Middle Initiative at the University of Ottawa, said governments are trying to achieve two things at once: restore affordability while also maintaining an environment that encourages confidence in the market and developers to keep building.
'The governments are trying to do two things that are, on the face of it, inherently contradictory,' he said. 'We do need prices to fall. But we've seen over the last three years what happens when prices continue falling. It basically just breaks the economics for builders by eliminating the incentive to build. That creates a challenging situation where we want low prices, but we also want to create the conditions for builders to build more.'
But cracks are starting to show in this industry. The condo markets in Ontario and British Columbia have experienced significant losses in pricing value, with signs of financial distress in the sector. What used to be an attractive area for investors to park their money is no longer the case.
Condo apartment sales have dropped by 75 per cent in the Greater Toronto Area and 37 per cent in Vancouver since the pandemic peak in 2022, according to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. (CMHC).
'The story of the dog-crate condominiums is well understood here in Toronto and in downtown Vancouver,' Ron Butler, a mortgage broker and host of the Angry Mortgage Podcast, said.
He said buyers who bought at preposterous prices five years ago, particularly in the pre-construction condo market, will not be able to see a return on their investment. Even worse, a number of condo projects in Canada's two largest cities have entered receivership or been cancelled over the last two years.
One reason for the industry's decline is that Canada's population growth slowed to a crawl at the beginning of this year after several years of record-breaking growth in immigration. Some economists credited the previous surge in newcomers for masking the underlying weaknesses in the economy coming out of the pandemic as well as for keeping housing demand high in urban centres.
Butler said a combination of immigration curbs introduced last fall by the federal government and an increased number of for-purpose rentals entering the market are now the biggest contributors to a decline in rental prices.
'You literally couldn't imagine a worse set of circumstances (for these investors),' he said.
Condo prices in Toronto's surrounding suburbs are recording even more significant drops than in the city itself, according to a recent report by Moody Analytics. For example, prices in Halton Hills have fallen by as much as 50 per cent from their peak.
Prices are dropping elsewhere, too. The average national price of a one-bedroom rental unit in Canada decreased 3.6 per cent year over year to $1,857 in May 2025, according to the latest National Rent Report by Rentals.ca and Urbanation Inc.
'Odds are that rent is probably going to continue falling over the near term, so I wouldn't expect investors to make their way back anytime soon,' Hogue said.
He said the 10 per cent decline from the peak prices in the Toronto area is significant, but it has not completely reversed the price run-up experienced during the pandemic.
'A 10 per cent price decline historically would have been very significant and a big correction,' he said. 'But after the period we have gone through, it's only reversing a small fraction of the price increase we saw during the pandemic.'
Timing and speculation
Investor speculation in the real estate industry has often been a point of criticism from housing advocates. Butler said today's condo market debacle is what happens when you build a product solely around the priorities of investors instead of homeowners since it can lead to an oversupply of a product no one wants or can afford.
'The model of building high-rise condos is that you have to sell 75 per cent of the building on a presale basis, with people who will give you 20 per cent down,' he said. 'First of all, a lot of first-time homebuyers don't have the 20 per cent or need to come by it slowly, and, secondly, most of the 75 per cent of presales were comprised of investors.'
Investor participation in the real estate market has also been criticized for turning housing into an asset and for taking capital away from other productive parts of the economy. Canada's lagging business investment and productivity are longstanding issues.
But many regular homeowners often use their houses as a funding source for retirement or it may be the only major asset they own.
'We can think about the boomers who are sitting on big appreciation in their house values, but we can also think of recent buyers who probably overstretched themselves to get on the market,' St-Arnaud said. 'How do we deal with that if in 25 years they have zero appreciation on their main asset and they can't save for anything else?'
While this price adjustment is happening in the condo market, it is also happening in the house market in certain regions in Southern Ontario and British Columbia.
But not all regions are equal, since housing markets in the Prairies and Quebec are showing some resilience.
'The Quebec market seems to be on a sustained gradual upward movement,' Butler said. 'It's probably a reflection of the fact that it's just not badly priced.'
But once fast-growing markets such as Calgary are also facing more buyer-friendly conditions for the first time in years, though conditions are not as bad as they are for sellers in Vancouver and Toronto.
Justin Warthe, a realtor and real estate investor in Calgary, said the city's benchmark prices rose above $700,000 during the 2022-2023 peak from the mid-$500,000 range in 2020. The market has cooled since mid-2023, when interest rates rose, and the market has returned to having more than three months of inventory.
'It's definitely more of a buyer's market right now,' he said.
Warthe said he has to sit some clients down who think their houses will sell overnight and tell them that's not the reality anymore.
Still, despite this softening in some markets, St-Arnaud said Canada's housing remains the most expensive in the G7.
'House prices are still 26 per cent above where they were pre-COVID,' he said.
To get into the market, Canadians have heavily leveraged themselves, with residential mortgage debt reaching $2.3 trillion in February this year, compared to $1.6 trillion in 2019. Nearly half of all lending by Canadian banks is for residential mortgages.
The increase in mortgages has led to an increase in household debt, though Canada's current debt-to-disposable-income ratio at 173 per cent is a slight decline from the 179 per cent reported in 2024.
'It's one of the highest in the G20,' St-Arnaud said. 'How much more debt do we want our households to take? How much more vulnerability?'
The worst-case scenario for mortgage renewals if a longstanding global trade war leads to higher unemployment and depleted house prices was laid out by the Bank of Canada in its financial stability report in May.
'Results suggest that the share of mortgages in arrears by at least 90 days could rise to a level comparable with or higher than levels reached in the 2008-09 global financial crisis,' the central bank said.
This is, of course, the most severe scenario policymakers worked out and does not represent a likely eventuality.
About 60 per cent of mortgages in Canada will renew in 2025 or 2026, with 60 per cent of those mortgage holders expected to see an increase in their payments. That said, many of those mortgage holders are expected to be able to handle the higher payments.
But, as many economists have noted, the mortgage renewal risk will only be contained if the labour market holds. The unemployment rate held steady at 6.9 per cent in July, but Statistics Canada said net employment has only increased by 27,000 since the beginning of the year.
'A chief risk officer will tell you the three most important things about mortgage default, it's unemployment, unemployment and unemployment,' said Butler.
For now, the weakness has been driven by slow hiring, not layoffs, and recent GDP data suggests economic growth has merely flatlined in the second quarter, so the country has not entered a contraction.
'As long as there are no job losses, as long as people still have an income, we'll be OK,' St-Arnaud said. 'If there is a negative shock, if there is a recession and we start to see relatively big layoffs, I would be really concerned for the housing market and the ramifications to the broader economy.'
But the unemployment rate is rising in many places. For example, the jobless rate hit 7.9 per cent in Ontario in July and increased to 5.9 per cent in British Columbia. The construction industry led the way, with employment down 22,000 positions in July after five consecutive months of little change in the sector, according to Statistics Canada's latest release.
The stalling economy seems to be affecting homebuilders. CMHC forecasts that housing starts will come in at 237,800 in 2025, down from 245,367 in 2024. The Crown corporation also forecasts 227,734 housing starts next year and 220,016 in 2027. Those figures are all well below the 430,000 to 480,000 new homes per year it said are needed to restore affordability to 2019 levels.
'We are seeing the most expensive markets experiencing a price decline,' Moffatt said. 'And because of it, new home sales have basically evaporated in those two markets.'
Calderwood said developers are dealing with tariff-related cost increases and the new-build market has considerably slowed.
'I've had builders contact me and say it's the slowest they have ever seen it,' she said.
Moffatt said this slowdown will only exacerbate the supply issue. It may be hard to imagine now, but that lack of supply could fuel another bubble in pricing by the end of the decade.
'If we go through a period where nothing gets built and then the economy improves, we're not going to have a lot of inventory once people are ready to buy again,' he said.
Butler said the supply of homes that people want to buy will remain constrained for the foreseeable future.
'The undersupply is in first-time, low-rise homes for people to buy, whether they're single-family, townhouses or semis,' he said. 'In that particular area, in Ontario and British Columbia, building of that product collapsed 16 months ago.'
The CMHC expects the average house price to drop by two per cent this year, with a slow recovery starting in 2026 as trade tensions ease and economic conditions improve.
Calderwood said markets can quickly change, but she remains pessimistic that things will improve.
'A lot of realtors say they can predict the market, but we're not psychics,' she said. 'As long as Trump is in power and with that all the tariffs and chaos, I don't see it trending upward.'