When the mortgage guys start running for cover, maybe you should, too. It’s going to be one helluva dramatic Spring. If you own a home and have been thinking about cashing out at the top in March of April, too late. If you’re horny to buy, keep your pants on. Too early.
Just weeks after BMO ignited realtor dreams of a torrid season with its 2.99 mortgage special, fear wafts through the air. Days ago CMHC announced it’s running out of room to insure more high-ratio, high-risk loans – the stuff which has fueled Canada’s housing bubble and swollen agency books to almost a trillion dollars. Warnings of over-valuations and impending danger have come from the Bank of Canada, the IMF and most credible economists.
Now the nation’s second-biggest mortgage lender has quietly moved to protect itself in the event of a housing meltdown. CIBC’s wholesale lending arm, FirstLine – which supplies a torrent of cash to mortgage brokers – is cutting off borrowers who can’t verify their incomes, including small-business owners, commission salespeople and immigrants. The company is also capping loans at $1 million, which is tough news in Vancouver.
This has sparked speculation CMHC will also nix mortgages to the self-employed, at the same time it’s believed F will murder 30-year home loans in his coming federal budget, making inflated houses more unaffordable. Coming after predictions of mayhem in the condo markets of Toronto and Vancouver and deteriorating markets in much of the country, it’s a clear signal real estate is turning prickish.
In fact, nowhere might this be happening faster than the nation’s most delusional city.
In recent hours the crumble of Vancouver real estate has become apparent. Or is it a crash?
Listings have exploded as sales tank. With 20% more houses on the market than a year ago, there’s now an eight-month supply, turning the region into a buyer’s market scant weeks after bidding wars were a daily occurrence. But falling sales clearly show buyers expect prices to be the next casualty.
Sales are near record lows of the last ten years. Deals for detached homes on the west side, in Richmond and West Van are down between a third and 45%. Overall, sales plunged 13% from 2011 and 18% from 2010. Prices have dropped since hitting a high in the summer. Flippers are being stuck with properties they can’t move. Half of condo owners now selling, who bought in the last four years, are losing money. Sales of detached properties across the region just crashed 16% from last January.
In other words, in a city where real estate’s a god, where families shell out an average of 70% of income on shelter, where the savings rate is negative, basement boarders are desperately needed to stay afloat and debt is over the top, an ugly truth emerges. It’s not different, after all. There is a limit to house porn and financial insanity. And this is it.
Vancouver, whether you have to live there or not, is a harbinger of the national housing market. It shows in extremis what happens when emotion trumps logic, lenders lose their marbles, the media fails and an entire population believes in unicorns. It’s impossible to sustain a SFH average of $1.1 million in a city where family income averages $83,130. Nothing – not planeloads of hot Asians, cheap mortgages or a new mountain range covered in chocolate – is going to save this market from itself.
Just imagine the exposure major lenders have in that city. A 20% correction would plunge tens of thousands of families into negative equity, just at a time when the overall economy is struggling. Unemployment’s rising, incomes are running behind inflation, the forestry is a mess and construction jobs are being shed daily.
BC – all of it now, including the Island and Lower Mainland, plus the Fraser and Okanagan valleys – is shaping up to be the Ground Zero for Canada’s housing crunch. The impact will not be contained there. Time will show this is as unstoppable here as it was in the US – where chi-chi towns like Seattle and Boston thought they were immune. Until they weren’t.
But here’s all you need to know. Lenders are hustling to protect themselves. Bankers are worried. The government’s poised.
With luck we’ll avoid what’s befallen Americans. But what looms will not be short nor trite. For too long this pathetic blog has urged you to take profits and get liquid. I hope you did.
Carlyle’s parents sold their semi yesterday. “They should thank their lucky stars, and BMO’s 2.99 special,” he says. No kidding. Boomer rescue. But let’s have a moment of silence for the kiddies who bought.
“Dozens came through to see it over the weekend,” he says of the half-house in the eastern wilds of GTA’s Scarberia. Sixteen years old, and in need of a new roof. Listed at $415,000, sold for $400,000. “A young couple, 20-something, ended up buying the house at 96 percent asking. How can twenty-year-olds afford 400k houses????”
More on that in a minute, since there’s a good chance an era’s about to end.
“Anyways I’m happy for my boomer parents (they needed to sell … Dad is almost 68 still driving rigs, mom almost 65). They are going to live at the trailer in Georgian Bay for the summer and then not sure. I’m trying to convince them to retire and do half the year in a Florida RV community during winter the other half at their trailer in summer. It’s all they are going to be able to afford on their pensions. Whatever equity they get from the house will be used to pay off debt – most of it :(. Basically they have nothing for retirement except government pensions. The words on your blog about boomers ring true to me as I see it happening. My folks are just in the first wave.”
But this isn’t about fool Boomers who blew six decades, putting it all in a house, saving diddly and now must retire to a trailer surrounded by losers. It’s about the fools who come after.
Yesterday this spiritually uplifting blog gave you the latest: federal bank regulators warning of sub-prime lending practices, no-income lines of credit and dangerous condos, while CHMC revealed it’s running out of money. This is big news. Big consequences, maybe.
Now remember the housing bubble is the result of two things. Crazy low interest rates engineered by the government. Plus a federal agency which wipes away risk, allowing lenders to make homeowners out of people too challenged to save. Oh, and that Property Virgins babe realtor’s tube top. Forgot that.
The agency is CMHC and borrowers putting less than 20% down (almost 100% of first-time buyers) must pay a hefty insurance premium. This does not insure them, but rather their lender. So banks can shovel money out the door, secure in the knowledge if their clients default on the mortgage, taxpayers will make them whole. A few things have happened as a result: banks have lowered their lending standards; people with putrid credit get the same low rates as Justin Beaver; and the real estate market’s erupted, resulting in higher prices (and bigger loans).
Something else, too. Banks have been using CHMC to insure ‘conventional’ mortgages as well – ones with a bigger down payment. This makes the mortgages more attractive when bundled into securities, called ‘covered bonds’ which are then sold to investors (does any of this ring a bell?).
Just two banks alone (BMO and Scotia) sold $4.5 billion worth of covered bonds in January, and last year investors snapped up $25 billion of these things – supposedly high-quality, being backed with residential mortgages insured by CMHC.
Ironically, these bonds then help the banks lower mortgage costs, so people can borrow their brains out and force house prices higher (requiring more loans). This is how you get stuff like BMO’s 2.99% fiver which caused such an endorphin rush among the horny.
Still with me? Good. Now we have a problem. Over a year ago CMHC convinced Parliament to boost its insured lending ceiling to a staggering $600 billion – about the size of the federal debt. Seventeen months ago there was $100 billion cushion left. By last autumn it was $60 million and in a few months it will be gone. It means taxpayers are on the hook (between CMHC and the national debt) for more than a trillion dollars. Scarier, CMHC has reserves so small they’d be wiped out if only a small fraction of its high-risk mortgage debtors defaulted.
More immediately, unless CMHC is bloated even further by an act of Parliament, it won’t be able to insure all the loans lusty young buyers and greedy old bankers wish to cover. Kinda like a money drought.
“It may serve to tighten the housing market,” warns TD economist Sal Gulati. In fact, it could do worse. The entire real estate structure now rests on the ability of 20-year-olds without any net worth to buy $400,000 houses from 68-year-old Boomers, thus rescuing them from themselves. It could be history’s greatest wealth transfer. The old guys get cash. The young victims get debt. If things tank, the bank gets the house, the taxpayers get gored.
If Ottawa doesn’t increase CMHC’s ceiling, real estate’s flames will lose their fuel. Prices will tumble and recent young buyers will be in negative equity until menopause. But if hundreds of billions more are added, Canada’s bubble grows more dangerous and the consequences more dire.
What will F do? Odds are he’ll up the ceiling, while restricting credit – eliminating the 30-year mortgage and dropping amortizations to 25 years. That will increase monthly payments for virtually every new buyer. At a time when prices are inflated and local markets volatile gasbags, it will do nothing but hasten, and deepen, the inevitable correction.
Carlyle’s parents may think life in a trailer sucks. But they’ve no idea how profoundly their asses were just saved.
Too bad who’s paying for it.
