Pierre

Housing decline is bullish for Canada because it means (hopefully, at least) that capital will start to flow into productive sectors of the economy instead of real estate.

This is the only chart that matters on housing supply. Everything else is noise. And I'm sorry that people are able and willing to pay more for a historic brownstone, or Victorian is some of these cities than you can afford.

Patrick, I added the population growth rates to each of the cities for the 1960-2020 period. Given the length of the period, it does not capture perfectly what is going on, but you can still see the pattern: cities that grow really fast, see much larger increases in house prices. It’s understandable. Here’s why: for every 1% increase in the rate of population growth, the cost of housing increases at a rate of 3.3% to 6.0%. This is because of the absorption rate. Developers don’t want to grow housing too fast because they need to keep sales profitable. Rapid population growth creates massive price distortions. Cities like Vancouver, Victoria, and Toronto have grown so fast, they have seen a disproportionately high increase in housing costs.

it’s astounding that this hasn’t happened in Canada