Buying a house may remain out of reach for many Canadians for the foreseeable future, with mortgage costs unlikely to fall enough to offset lofty home prices and weak spending power, economists and real estate agents say. 0 Even with expectations that Bank of Canada will keep cutting rates in the coming months, the issue of home affordability - which has strangled Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s poll numbers - is unlikely to fade before the next election.
The mandate for the Liberal minority government ends at the end of October 2025, but an election could come well before then, with the Conservative opposition spoiling to end Trudeau’s nine-year run at the top.
“You won’t get back to an affordable range for housing on a sustained basis for a decade,” Tony Stillo, director at forecasting and analysis group Oxford Economics, said last week at a conference.
You said you had to buy a cheaper home to make money from the equity in your home. That is not true, and the examples I have showed how.
As for “free”, what is free is the increase in value of your home over time. That’s the investment part. There are people who bought homes in San Francisco back in the 1970’s who are now multi-millionaires simply due to the many-fold increase in the value of their home. With a HELOC or a reverse mortgage they can gain access to some or all of that money without needing to move to a cheaper house.