Fewer listings, faster sales, familiar losses

New GTA listings dropped sharply in July while sales ticked up, a shift reminetwork.com, NewmarketToday.ca and mpamag.com all called a market "tightening." cp24.com framed the same data as Toronto shifting into a "balanced" housing market, TRREB's preferred label for a market that favours neither side outright. Financial Post's read: fewer new listings, a slight rise in sales, both true at once.

Ontario new home sales jumped 130% after the province's enhanced HST rebate landed, The Hub reported, evidence the subsidy is doing exactly what it was built to do. The existing condo market has not caught the same wave, The Hub's own reporting says resale condos still lag, and one Ontario home resold for more than $1 million below its 2017 price, blogTO reported this week.

Asking rents are still down 4% year over year in July, the same figure we flagged last week, unchanged in this week's data from Canadian Mortgage Trends and CityNews Toronto. mpamag.com calls it a two-year slide finally showing signs of bottoming out. Nobody in this data set is calling it a recovery yet; stabilizing is the word doing the work.

Sources: Bank of Canada · The Hub. Figures as reported that week; always check the primary source.

The case for a Bank of Canada rate hike is getting a second look

The Bank of Canada's policy rate has sat at 2.25% on every date we have in this week's data, from May 14 through August 11, and the five-year conventional mortgage rate has been just as flat at 6.09% since May 20. Three months of nothing moving is the calmest stretch landlords have had in years.

That calm got questioned twice this week. The Toronto Star ran a piece arguing the Bank may soon feel pressure to raise rates because of inflation, while flagging that the logic behind a hike right now may not actually hold up. Mortgage industry outlet mpamag.com asked the same question more bluntly: is a Bank of Canada rate hike becoming more likely?

Neither piece commits to an answer, and neither should we. TD Economics' weekly rate note and Canadian Mortgage Trends' rate forecast roundup both landed this week too, alongside forecast pages from nesto.ca and Ratehub.ca on where prime and five-year rates go next. Reading five forecasts in five days is a good way to learn that forecasters disagree with each other as often as they agree.

Here is why a landlord should care about chatter, not just decisions. A rate that has not moved in three months is easy to budget around; a rate that might move is not, and mortgages renewing in the next year are the ones exposed first. Rents, meanwhile, are still down from a year ago, so a landlord facing a renewal has less room on the revenue side to absorb a jump on the cost side.

Our take: We do not forecast the Bank of Canada, nobody reliably does, but landlords with a mortgage renewing in the next 12 months should build a plan for a hold or a small hike, not a cut. With rents still soft, a rate surprise now would squeeze both ends of the ledger at once.

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  A McGill study links short-term rental restrictions to lower long-term rents, ctvnews.ca reports. If you are choosing between a nightly guest and a yearly tenant, the research just told you which one your neighbours would vote for.

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  Ontario's Landlord and Tenant Board is opening up a new database, Sam Kamra told Yahoo Finance, promising more transparency for a tribunal that has mostly been a black box. We will believe the wait times improve when we see them.

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  An Ontario home resold for more than $1 million below its 2017 price, blogTO reports. Somewhere, a spreadsheet from 2017 just got very awkward.

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  TRREB is pushing for a simpler ownership model for multiplex housing, easier for one owner to buy and hold a fourplex without the current red tape. A small win for landlords who want to add doors, not paperwork.

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Corporate Rentals in Toronto: An Owner's Guide to Mid-Term Stays

We broke down what corporate and mid-term rentals actually pay versus a standard year-long lease, useful if you have a unit near a hospital or a head office. Read it