Toronto leads Vancouver in luxury home market
Sales of $1-million-plus Toronto-area single-family homes rose 83 per cent year over year in July and August. That’s 3,026 homes, with 55 per cent of them inside Toronto’s borders. Meanwhile, Vancouver saw a decline of 30 per cent in July and 65 per cent in August, for a total of 288 sales of $1-million-plus homes.

Tarion needs to increase homebuyers deposit protection
Tarion’s limit for deposit protection is fixed at $20,000 on condominiums and $40,000 on homes. This protection hasn’t been changed in years, while home prices and deposit amounts have skyrocketed.

Fintrac found ‘significant’ deficiencies at nearly 500 real estate firms: data
Canada’s anti-money laundering agency conducted on-site examinations of more than 800 real estate companies over four-and-a-half years and found “significant” or “very significant” deficiencies during 60 per cent of those visits, new data shows. A document obtained by The Canadian Press through an Access to Information request shows that Fintrac conducted 823 examinations of companies in the real estate sector between 2012 and mid June of this year. The federal anti-money laundering watchdog found “significant” deficiencies with the anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing controls at 468 of those companies, while 28 companies had “very significant” deficiencies. Meanwhile, 324 companies had only “limited” deficiencies. None of the companies were named in the document.

BC’s foreign buyer tax has ‘little’ to do with Vancouver sales slump and GTA spike: economist
“The foreign buyer tax had very little impact on Vancouver home sales, which have been on a downward trend since February,” writes Paul Ashworth, chief North American economist for Capital Economics. “That supports our claim that, rather than foreign buyers, it is irresponsible lending and rising domestic debt that has been driving Canada’s housing bubble,” he continues.

Toronto’s new home prices are rising faster than Vancouver’s, but don’t blame speculation — yet
An economist with one of Canada’s biggest banks predicted yesterday that prices for homes on the resale market could start rising faster in Toronto than in Vancouver as early as 2017. But when it comes to new home sales, this is already a reality, according to Statistics Canada’s latest New Housing Price Index, released this week. In July, new home prices rose 7 per cent in the combined metro region of Toronto and Oshawa — the latter is part of the GTA but is a separate census metro area — compared to where they stood a year ago, according to the index.

New park to transform Toronto and attract investors
Rail Deck Park, recently announced by Mayor John Tory, is a 21 acre green space that will cloak the railroad tracks between Blue Jays Way and Bathurst Street in Downtown Toronto. It has developers and investors excited about the prospect of condo towers overlooking a large green space ala Central Park in Manhattan.

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Upcoming Realty Point Seminars

• New Agent training courses have been added on a weekly basis. Regular topics include learning the Agent CRM and learning how to create a website in your Agent Dashboard. These webinars are available online only, for more information and to register please login to your Agent Dashboard and visit the Office Events Section.
• FINTRAC Training has been scheduled for several dates and locations. This is mandatory training for all brokerages and agents.
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Cosmos Condos in Vaughan
High interest, unique and custom designs developed with great care and attention to individual suites will make Cosmos Condos a highly sought after location in Toronto’s newest downtown in Vaughan.
There is a Tesla car to be won by the agent that attains specific sales targets for this project!

Featuring Marco Filice, Senior Vice President, Liberty Development, Barbara Lawlor, President, Baker Real Estate Inc, Angelika Bekman, Broker, RE/MAX Holdings Inc and hosted by Zia Abbas.

Torontonians are paying the highest price to live the urban dream
House prices have been climbing steadily in Toronto since 2000. The average price of a detached house passed $1-million last year, economic jitters be damned. An eight-foot-wide Victorian went on sale for three-quarters of a million.

FINTRAC steps up training for realtors
The anti-money laundering watchdog put together a work book and a webinar for real estate agents, and last summer gave a presentation to the Canadian Real Estate Association, according to emails obtained by The Canadian Press through an access-to-information request.

Canadians optimistic of greater strength in housing sector – poll
A significant portion of Canadians has taken heart in the continued activity in the country’s real estate markets and is expecting even greater strength from the sector that has been acknowledged as a tent-pole in Canada’s still-recovering economy, weekly polling found.

UrbanToronto’s Development Guide: Growth to Watch For 2016
2016 editorials in an exhaustively comprehensive survey of Toronto’s ongoing and upcoming development.

Do you know why you might get sued?
Do you know the No. 1 reason driving Real Estate Council of Ontario (RECO) complaints and successful lawsuits against Realtors?

Welcome to the jungle of Toronto’s real estate market
The Greater Toronto Area’s notorious bidding wars, bullies and jaw-dropping offers propelled the region’s real estate market to a new high water mark for the first quarter of 2016.

Deconstructing housing affordability in the GTA
Housing affordability is a growing concern in Canada, especially in urban centres such as the GTA, where the average price of a detached home in the 416 area code now exceeds $1-million according to the Toronto Real Estate Board’s latest resale stats. However, there is no consensus on how to quantify the problem. That might soon change with the recent debut of the shelter consumption affordability ratio, or the SCAR index, as the Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis (CANCEA) calls it.

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Toronto’s residential land prices reach new highs: ‘More condominiums coming’
Residential land prices increase with the emphasis on higher-density condo projects coming to market.

5 reasons why the market meltdown matters to all Canadians
The recent pull-back of stock markets around the globe could signify any number of future trends. here’s a primer on how it can affect you.

Drop in commodities brings deeper economic pain for some provinces
It’s feel like a recession depending where in the country you live. Also read “Home prices to rise despite economic slowdown: Poll“.

Bank of Canada: policies are managing risks from housing market strength
“The resulting strength in the housing market has increased household imbalances, but the risks stemming from these vulnerabilities have been well managed by complementary macroprudential policies,” Bank of Canada deputy governor Lawrence Schembri said in the prepared remarks of a speech. Also read “Housing market ‘collateral damage’ for BoC amid rate conundrum: Economist” and “Bank of Canada will cut interest rates again on Sept. 9, National Bank predicts“.

Are these Canada’s best property markets?
The list, compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), affiliated with the Economist magazine, can be taken as indication of which Canadian centres offer investors a steady stream of renters, regardless of minor fluctuations in employment and commerce.

New Template FINTRAC Training Materials
To further assist brokers in meeting their training program obligations, on August 24, 2015, CREA released an update to their template compliance manual that provides more detail on how to design a FINTRAC training regime.

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