With many Canadian homeowners facing a sharp rise in mortgage payments, many of them have decided to bail, resulting in the highest number of Toronto housing units for sale in more than a decade and signaling a big drop in prices in the coming months. In Toronto, a city where two-thirds of the country's condominiums are sold, considered a bellwether for other big metropolitan areas, inventories have pushed past highs reached 10 years ago, data showed. Rising inventories with anemic sales show a high degree of stress in Canada's biggest property market, real estate consultants said.
Not only should they not be thought of as investments, they shouldn’t go up in value like investments. A house should slowly depreciate over time. Because of inflation, the dollar-value of the house should maybe go up, but adjusting for inflation it should go down. If you do repairs, maintenance, etc. then maybe it should more or less hold value. If you do a renovation, maybe it should go up in value. But as a structure that gets slowly damaged by the passage of time, it should slowly go down in value.
What’s ridiculous is that someone who made a solid $200k investment 25 years ago and then lived in a small apartment is worse off than someone who simply bought a $200k house and lived there.
If housing keeps going up in value then pretty soon the only people able to live in a house will be the ones inheriting one.
From what I understand, it’s not the building that increases in value, but the property it’s on.
That’s why developers have no problem leveling homes to build something else. The land is what they paid for.
But, I could be wrong. 😬
I’d like to see the math on this, please. A family friend who works in investments does claim the exact diametric opposite, and I’ve seen things from time to time that rather support that. If you know otherwise I’d love to read what you’ve read.
I’m only eyeballing graphs, but from this one, a Toronto detached house in 1999 was roughly $300k, and today it’s roughly $1.7m. That matches about a 7% annualized rate of return. A document from S&P Global says the TSX index has grown at an 8% annualized rate.
A house you buy as an investment might slightly lag behind an investment in an index fund. But, if you have to pay rent because you’re not living in your investment house-purchasing seems to win by a long shot.
You are ignoring maintenance, tax and other “running” costs that have to be paid to own and live in your own house.
I am a homeowner and while I intially agreed with you out of instinct, if you figure that monthly rent should be thr equivalent to property taxes, maintenance and whatever utilities are included in the rent the big push I’m favour of home ownership is the fact that you don’t pay capital gains on a primary residence. In the above example, an investment gaining $1.4M in value would have (Ontario) taxes of around $350k… So it really depends on whether the house being considered is a primary residence or not.