Episode Details

Canada's housing market does not need to crash dramatically to destroy a generation of wealth. It just needs to stay exactly where it is. Ron Butler, founder of Angry Mortgage and one of Canada's most widely followed mortgage analysts, joins Jim Csek and Iain Burns for a conversation that covers everything the government does not want Canadians to hear about what is actually happening to their homes, their mortgages, their cities, and their country.In this exclusive interview Butler delivers a systematic and unsparing account of how Canada's housing disaster unfolded and where it is headed. Toronto is the epicentre. Condos that sold for $1,300 to $1,600 per square foot in 2021 are clearing at approximately $745 per square foot today. That is a 40 to 50% loss on paper for buyers who never intended to close, assumed they could flip through assignment, and now face developers seizing deposits and litigating them for the difference. Approximately 10,000 to 15,000 people are in what Butler calls true catastrophe, lose everything territory, having refinanced their primary homes to fund deposits on investment properties that are now worth far less than the mortgage and closing costs combined.Then there is Brampton. The number one city in Canada for mortgage delinquency and court action. Butler explains why: during the foreign student boom, residents jammed 18 to 24 students into 3,500 square foot homes, collecting $800 a month per person. That income is now zero. The students are gone. The mortgages remain. The houses are going into default and prices have dropped 40% from March 2022 peaks with no floor in sight.Butler walks through his five-point program of disaster for Canadian real estate: unbridled foreign investment post-2009 that hopped from Vancouver to Toronto when bans arrived, COVID-era rates at historic lows that produced irrational buying at peak prices, pandemic work-from-home delusions that drove people to buy in places they would never have chosen, the rise of the leveraged real estate investment coach industry that convinced Canadians you could buy 12 properties on a 1.59% rate, and the co-signer phenomenon where parents who believed Toronto prices go up 8% forever co-signed mortgages their children could not qualify for and now face losses on both properties simultaneously.On the housing strategy: Build Canada Homes is social housing. Not one unit is for sale. The Parliamentary Budget Officer says the program will produce approximately 26,000 additional homes over five years against Carney's promise of doubling supply to 500,000. Butler calls it the same lie Trudeau told forever and says it will never get past 100,000.On the root cause: Butler names the Anglo disease. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom all made the same mistake. They converted a place to live into a financial instrument. Every buyer had a substantial mortgage, typically 80 to 95% leverage, on an asset they believed could only go up. Trees do not grow to the sky. The aftermath always arrives.On where it goes next: down, then flat for years. No recovery. No requirement for prices to increase. The 1990s saw prices fall from 1990 to 1994 and then go nowhere for years while inflation continued to erode real values. The flat market is not the end of the pain. It is the pain continuing quietly while everything else gets more expensive. Kelowna is about to add 30% more rental capacity to a population that is not growing 30%. Rents will fall further. Young Canadians will keep leaving for Houston, Costa Rica, and Portugal because the math does not work here and they know it.The Really Big Show: The thinking Canadian's daily briefing, independent and informed🔴 Live every weekday at 9AM PST📍 Independent. Unapologetic. Canadian.👉 Support the show: https://thereallybigshow.ca#canadiannews #canadapolitics #canada #nowmedia #thereallybigshow #canadianhousing #ronbutler #mortgagecrisis #torontorealestate #angrymortgage