City
April the Best Month Ever: Toronto Real Estate Board
It's dog eat dog out there. The Toronto Real Estate Board just announced that April was the best month ever recorded for sales with 9542 sales. April 30th was said to be the best single day ever with 581 reported sales. With four months gone by so far, 2007 is 5% ahead of last year's pace for sales. Wow.
So what does all this mean? It means now is a great time to be a seller, bidding wars are becoming the norm, and more believers are being added to the faithful every day!
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But cheer up, because this also means that when you do jump into the market you'll have a rapidly appreciating asset under your butt!
A few years later.."Honey, why has our mortgage payment tripled?"
"Whaddya mean foreclosure?"
US-style ARMs are legislatively prohibited in Canada. Our floating rate mortgages based on Prime (currently 6%), or fixed rate mortgages which are usually adjusted every 5 years from a Prime measure.
Current rates are between 5.25% and a but more than 6%, depending on your preferance.
I know alot of people here who got some big surprises and their mortgages doubled or tripled.
Cathy Busby is unable to meet the repayments on her home of 11 years after interest rates rocketed 40 percent. Up to two million people with so-called subprime or high-risk mortgages have already had their homes repossessed or will default on their loans in the coming months, according to industry estimates.
The BoC moves interest rates slowly and incrementally, typically .25% at a time. Because mortgages are based off Prime (which is based on the BoC rate), mortgage payments are fairly predictable--interest rates have been between 4% and 8% for the past 15 years.
These friends of yours shouldn't be so shocked that their 1%, no-money-down, interest-only, 35-year-am American mortgages are unsustainable.
With respect to the article, a 40% rise in mortgage rates means a jump from 4.0% to 5.6%, which would change a $1050/mo monthly payment into a $1230/mo monthly payment. That's hardly "double or triple".
I was being fecetious (spelling?), actually, the double or triple is closer to the heating bills lately: - )
But someone budgeted for $1050 may be hard pressed to come up with that extra couple of hundred bucks.
This is the free market in me speaking, but someone who has no wiggle room whatsoever in their budget should choose a fixed-rate mortgage instead of a variable rate. Caveat emptor, and give me a variable rate mortgage anyway, thank you.
This is all besides the point, because I want people to default on their mortgages so the Toronto market will be flooded with cheap, foreclosed Condos & Towns! Yeehaw!
Cave Spot
http://www.cavespot.com
Also the housing market in the United States has totally crashed. You can get a condo on the beach in San Diego for $150,000!
I suggest we start giving it a try. Give love to the ones that need it.
God will appreciate it.