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Sean Cooper was able to pay off his mortgage in just 3 years and is the best selling author of Burn Your Mortgage. As someone deeply involved in real estate, Sean is constantly analyzing the real estate market in Canada. We invited Sean to the Smarter Loans studio so he can share his top real estate trends going into 2020.
Video Transcript:
Hi I’m Sean Cooper, author of “Burn Your Mortgage” and I’ve been analyzing the market and here are the top real estate trends I see in the coming months.
The first trend is low interest rates.
With the uncertainty right now in the economy and the fact that the Canadian economy isn’t growing as quickly as anticipated, I foresee interest rates remaining low for at least the end of 2019 heading into 2020, so that’s good news for mortgage borrowers.
Trend number two is shared equity mortgages.
Shared equity mortgages are something new, coming out in September of 2019 and essentially what it is, is the government is going to be sharing in the ownership of your property so if you’re buying a resale property they’ll give you up to 5% of the down payment if you’re buying a new property it’s 10% of the downpayment. That helps your mortgage payments be more affordable and that helps you get into the real estate market sooner. The only limit to that is you can only spend up to $480,000 on a property so in more affordable markets like Winnipeg and Saskatoon it might help but in markets like Toronto and Vancouver there aren’t a lot of properties at that price point so I don’t think it’s going to have as much of an effect there.
Trend number three is modest price gains in terms of home prices in Toronto Vancouver.
I just don’t see the home prices going up at gangbuster rates a system going up perhaps 2, or 3 or even 5% in Toronto but I don’t see them going up at a crazy rate like they were perhaps two or three years ago. The mortgage stress test has made it more challenging to qualify for a mortgage so that’s definitely put a bit of a damper on the market but I do still see them going up about the rate of inflation.
