Commentary
Housing markets in Canada are really upside down. Recently, Canada’s aggregate housing price index suffered the biggest decline in nearly 20 years. On July 6, CBC News—the Canadian public broadcaster—reported, “The Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB) said 6,474 homes were sold in the Greater Toronto Area last month, down by 41 percent compared with last June.” Furthermore, as reported by Bloomberg in mid-July, “Greater Toronto has seen benchmark prices fall 4.5 percent in three months to C$1.21 million (about $928,000). But the declines are steepest in the cities and towns around Toronto that gained the most during the Covid-19 pandemic as people used the freedom of remote work to move further away.”…