In its latest quarterly Housing Market Assessment Report released Wednesday, the federal housing agency said although evidence of overheating, overvaluation and price acceleration in the Winnipeg market remains “weak”, there is still “moderate” evidence of overbuilding on the condo side.
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“With slower employment growth and lower net migration, fewer resale homes have exchanged hands this past year, while the recent reduction in new listings reflects homeowners’ reluctance to list their homes until market conditions improve”, CMHC said.
Despite the strong evidence of overvaluation, the CMHC said Vancouver’s housing market shows evidence of moderately, but not strongly, problematic conditions.
CMHC defines evidence of problematic conditions as imbalances in the housing market.
Overvaluation and overbuilding remain the most prevalent problematic conditions in the 15 centres covered by the HMA, with overvaluation detected in nine centres while overbuilding detected in seven.
In the CMHC’s previous assessment, released in January, the organization had found moderate evidence of overvaluation.
CMHC’s HMA analytical framework is created to evaluate the extent to which there is evidence of problematic housing market conditions in Canadian housing markets. But it’s an improvement from the third quarter of a year ago, when the CMHC rated the evidence of problematic conditions as “strong” because of concerns about both overbuilding and overvaluation. They are overheating, overvaluation, overbuilding and price acceleration. “Overall, we see moderate evidence of problematic conditions in Vancouver”.
Regina: “We continue to detect strong evidence of problematic conditions in Regina’s housing market”.
Acceleration in house prices, which could be partially reflective of speculative activity.
In Vancouver’s case, the housing agency said “Single-detached home prices are now observed to be at levels higher than those consistent with financial, economic and demographic fundamentals”. And “while we do not detect overbuilding, we have some concerns about the high inventory of completed and unsold condominium apartments”. “We have been encouraging CMHC to begin to use the association’s home price index”, a more accurate measure of price trends than the average price used by the CMHC, he said.
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Hamilton: Despite the fact that this is one of Canada’s hottest markets, there’s “weak evidence” of price acceleration and overbuilding, but “moderate evidence” of overvaluation.
