In recent weeks, a number of reports have been published on the housing and mortgage industry. We know you hate having to scramble between materials to get a complete overview of the market, so we’ve done the work and summarized everything in one convenient place!
Mortgages by the numbers
- Average mortgage: $150,000
- Number of households who are mortgage-free: 3.75 million (39% of total)
- Number of households with mortgages: 5.7 million (of 9.45 million households)
- Percentage of Canadians who buy homes each year: 4.5%-5.5%
[It’s incredible to think that such small percentage of the market drives home prices for the rest of the population]
Mortgage rate type by popularity:
- Fixed: 63% (3.6 million home owners)
- Variable: 30% (1.7 million home owners)
- Hybrid: 6% (350,000 home owners)
- Variable rate mortgages are most popular with those aged 35 to 44
- The average mortgage interest rate for home owners’ mortgages is 4.04%, only marginally lower than the last year’s average of 4.09%
- Average amount of time it takes people to pay off a mortgage: 2/3 of the original amortization period
- 50%of borrowers who have never increased payments or made a lump-sum prepayment
- 11% of people who utilized their skip-a-payment privileges
- 5% of people who missed a mortgage payment they weren’t allowed to miss:
[Missed payments have become slightly more common in recent years according to CAAMP data]
- All things being equal, for every 1% that mortgage rates increase, households with an average income and a high-ratio mortgage can afford roughly 9% less house
- Mortgage rate discounting remains widespread in Canada. During 2010 and 2011, the average typical discounted rate for 5-year fixed rate mortgages was 1.44 percentage points lower than typical “posted” rates
- Sixty-one per cent of Canadians expect rates to increase in the next 12 months, according to a Canadian Association of Accredited Mortgage Professionals (CAAMP) poll
New mortgages trends (2010 – 2011)
Source of new mortgages:
- Banks: 49%
- Brokers: 27%
- Other: 24% (14% of these are Credit Unions)
[Overall broker share now sits at 23%, down over the last few years due to aggressive pricing competition from the banks]
- Variable mortgages make up 35% of new mortgages
[Meaning variable mortgages are trending upwards, since overall they represent only 30% of mortgages.]
- 41% of new mortgages have longer amortization periods (greater than 25 years), which is almost double the national average of 22%.
- Although 35 year amortization periods were eliminated in March of 2011, 22% of new mortgages span 31+ years.
First-time home buyers
- First-time homebuyers accounted for about one in every two homes sold in Canada in the past two years (more than a 250,000 sales per year).
- Over one-fifth of first-time home buyers purchased a newly-built home. Of these, about one in three opted for a condominium unit.
- The majority of first-time buyers are in the under-35 age group with the 25-34 segment alone accounting for six out of every ten first-time buyers.
- About one in four recent first-time buyers was a single-person household.
- The average house price for a recent first-time buyer was about $273,000. This is about four times the average annual household income of about $69,000
Plus, a few figures on the exceptional Vancouver Housing Market
- The housing market in British Columbia has been exploding recently and leading the charge is its largest city, Vancouver. Residential sales in the metropolitan Vancouver area jumped up 25% from a year ago. The numbers continued to climb in 2011, from January to February, sales have hiked up 70%. Even into March, sales rose another 32%.
Last year, Vancouver had the third-highest housing costs among English-speaking cities worldwide, only behind Hong Kong and Sydney.
- Vancouver`s median home price of $602,000 was almost ten times the annual median household income of $63,100.
- The average home price in greater Vancouver rose 14% from 2009 to 2010.
Sources: