Blog

  • “Days of Rock Bottom Mortgage Rates Numbered”

    I came across the article Mortgages still the story of the day for the big banks in the Globe and Mail. It is a long article and the title of the article seems to not be entirely consistent with everything stated in the article (this seems to be pretty common practice in newspaper articles from…

  • Vancouver Mortgage and Real Estate Thoughts

    I have now had some time to think about and digest more the changes that are coming April 19th to the mortgage rules, the ones that are published, and the ones that aren’t. Everyone is still cloudy on exactly how the changes will be implemented and additionally what effect it will have on the market,…

  • More CMHC Mortgage Policy Changes

    The government today announced a couple more changes that impact homebuyers beyond the announcements made several weeks ago. These changes will be likely adopted by the other two mortgage insurers in Canada, AIG and Genworth.

  • Economists suggest rate hike imminent affecting variable rates

    Another new item of news with mortgage implications has come out today: Pressure grows for Bank of Canada to hike rates In sharp contrast to my variable mortgage outlook from one day ago, this new article talks about very strong growth in the Canadian economy the past quarter, and how there is pressure to raise…

  • U.S. economy weakness helps keep variable mortgage rates low

    This is one new article that came across my desk this morning: http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/100226/business/us_economy In summary, it is stating that the pace of growth for the US economy for the last quarter of 2009 was 5.9%, beating analyst estimates. Why is a mortgage broker writing a commentary on the US economy? I will tell you in…

  • Canada may require higher mortgage downpayments: report

    http://ca.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idCATRE5BK2FU20091221 I find this to be an interesting article. This is similar to what the government did last year with regards to requiring 5% downpayment and eliminating 40 year amortizations. At that time last year, although it made my job a little more difficult in terms of financing clients, I could understand why they did…