The Bank of Canada is widely expected to deliver its seventh consecutive interest rate hike at its rate decision announcement this week.

What’s less certain is the size of the move, with markets and experts split between a 25- or 50-bps increase.

“Policymakers have done little in recent weeks to provide any clarity here, and economic data has been yielding mixed messages,” economists from National Bank of Canada wrote in a recent research note.

“Stronger-than-expected jobs and GDP growth along with still-hot inflation contrasts with a rapidly deteriorating housing market, weak household consumption and forward-looking indicators suggesting inflation relief is coming,” they added.

An additional hike will bring the Bank’s overnight target rate to either 4.00% or 4.25%, and imply a prime rate of 6.20% or 6.45%—a level not seen since 2007.

Toronto has been recognized as one of the top 25 best cities across the globe to live and work in for 2023.

Resonance Consultancy, a global consultancy firm, recently released its World’s Best Cities list and Toronto is one of the few Canadian cities that made it.

It is the highest-ranked city across Canada to have hit the top 100 list, coming in at 24th. Over thirty places later comes Montreal at 57, then Calgary at 65, Vancouver at 69, and Ottawa at 96th.

According to the ranking, Toronto is “poised for big things”, and cracked the top 25 list due to its diversity and education.

The Ontario Line subway has always seemed like a pipe dream — a figment of Premier Doug Ford’s imagination that he seemingly invented just in time for announcing the Government of Ontario‘s take over of major Toronto transit infrastructure projects in April, 2019.

Nevertheless, that pipe dream is gradually turning into reality — a real project with tracks, stations, trains and, well, pipes. Provincial transit agency, Metrolinx, and the “procurement and commercial lead for major provincial construction projects,” Infrastructure Ontario (IO), have announced that they have awarded a $6 billion fixed-price contract to Ontario Transit Group (OTC) for designing, building and financing the Ontario Line Southern Civil, Stations and Tunnel (South Civil) package. The award includes $5.5 billion for capital costs and $0.5 billion for financing and transaction costs.

The Ontario government unveiled a series of new measures aimed at tackling the province’s housing supply shortage and affordability crisis on Tuesday, including plans to cut development costs and to allow property owners to build up to three residential units on a single lot without a bylaw amendment.

The government provided details on the new legislation, which largely targets red tape and municipal zoning laws that stall housing construction, this week.

“The legislation supports our new plan to further reduce bureaucratic inefficiencies that delay construction and increase costs for homebuyers and renters,” Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing of Ontario Steve Clark told reporters on Oct. 25. “It also supports greater density near transit, as well as measures to protect and help homebuyers and also use provincial lands as sites more for attainable housing.”

Over the last month, the conversation on Toronto’s housing crisis has seen the volume turned up as candidates for the municipal election outlined platforms to address one of the City’s preeminent issues. As an eyebrow-raising new housing plan from the Provincial Government to create 1.5 million homes is tabled, high prices and now high mortgages rates are creating barriers to many for house or condo ownership. Tricon Residential is a multi-family development company that has sought to ease the housing crisis by delivering rental housing in the form of high-rise condo style developments, and their most recent downtown project, The Taylor, provides some insights into how their process works. 

Canada’s real estate boom discussed back in February 2022 was heavily investor-driven, especially in the context of new construction. Betterdwelling.com sifted through ownership data and discovered that most condos built since 2016 are investors owned. Those owners could be landlords who want: (i) a second home  (ii) an income source or (iii) just a place to seed equity. Regardless of the motivation, the “most affordable” housing option is, by an overwhelming majority, investor-owned.

As reported earlier by the Residential Construction Council of Ontario (RESCON) and Global News rising Canadian interest rates as well as some other trends in the construction industry may be changing the trajectory of Toronto’s condominium market.

In its Condominium Market Survey for the second quarter of 2022, Urbanation reported that 6,792 new condo units were sold in the second quarter. This is a decline of 19% from Q1, and just under twenty-five percent year-over-year. The global news article entitled, Here’s how high-interest rates are impacting Canada’s condo demand noted the experts forecast the sale of only 10,000 more units launched between now and January 1, 2023, with 10,000 units being delayed or scraped.

It’s typically part of the real estate world that’s not seen by your average homebuyer. But the condominium assignment sales segment of the market has been turned on its head this year as interest rates rapidly jumped. And according to one expert, the plunge in assignment sales activity is not done yet.

“When I say it’s the tip of the iceberg, it’s because I know there’s further interest rate hikes coming. And I know that this is now unchartered territory from having to qualify for a mortgage perspective,” Simeon Papailias, managing partner at Toronto-based real estate sales and consulting firm REC Canada, told Yahoo Finance Canada  in a phone interview.

As historically low interest rates fuelled seemingly ever-climbing home prices, Papailias says, condo preconstruction sales were “on fire”, up until March of this year.

Every night before they go to bed, Mayor John Tory and members of Toronto council should say a little prayer for the municipal land transfer tax.

The tax — an extra municipal fee charged to the buyer on real estate transactions in Toronto — deserves an enormous amount of credit for keeping the city financially solvent over the last decade. It’s not a stretch to say it has been city hall’s salvation. 

Even as the mayor and council have struggled to find enough revenue to fund local services like transit and homeless shelters, the LTT has been a straight-up cash bonanza. When the tax was introduced in 2009 by former mayor David Miller, the city estimated it could bring in about $150M a year.

Evan Dunfee won an Olympic bronze medal in the 50-kilometre racewalk last summer in Tokyo. This fall, the 32-year-old is running for city council in his hometown of Richmond, the fourth largest municipality in Metro Vancouver.

A top election priority is getting more housing built in a city that, like much of Canada, is a sea of low-density, detached homes. With housing a hot political issue, there’s been a tendency for politicians to promise the easy and vague – which usually involves pledging to get lots of new homes built, without specifying how.

Mr. Dunfee is getting more specific, as are some other candidates in municipal elections this month in British Columbia and Ontario. He’s talking about the mechanics of how. Among his specific ideas are loosening rules around minimum lot sizes to allow more homes on less land, ditching parking minimums and allowing townhomes to be built in older neighbourhoods.