Updated first-time home buyer incentives for Canadians!

Did you know, you can get first-time buyer incentives more than once?

Enjoy the guide to buying your first home in Greater Vancouver.

Listen and subscribe for more!

Inventory hits a 4-year high, mortgage rates are falling and here is your market update

If you bought an average detached house in Greater Vancouver in January, you are now almost $120,000 richer

If you bought an average townhouse in Greater Vancouver in January, you are now almost $69,000 richer

If you bought an average condo in Greater Vancouver in January, you are now over $25,000 richer

In this episode, we cover the new legislative changes to the Residential Tenancy Act as well as a number of skill, testing questions. Keaton covers what all the latest changes mean including the negative and positive implications. We also cover questions like, what's a bad tenant or lousy landlord? When is it time to seek help from a property manager? What do you think of the new Airbnb ban...

Listen and subscribe for more!

The Bank of Canada Holds is over Overnight Rate at 5%. This came as no surprise, most of us in the industry didn't expect much much to happen until June. To be clear, the bank Canada announcement is specific to variable or line of credit mortgages. Fixed mortgages have been coming down since last October, but the media doesn't seem to be covering that for some reason.

So you might be asking, what's the holdup? Why are they not stopping the pain and lowering floating interest rates?

High inflation in the US is a huge factor, it has a ripple effect up here in Canada. The high cost of housing also keeps our Canadian inflation numbers high. Obviously, the higher cost of fuel with things like a carbon tax doesn't help either.

Canada is currently experiencing high unemployment numbers.

Yes, you heard that right. Our federal government is added again and wants to make it harder to qualify for a mortgage starting in 2025.

If it's not hard enough already, I am disheartened to say that it's about to get harder

The new rule, set to take effect in the first quarter of 2025, limits the amount of mortgage a bank can issue to a maximum 4.5 times a borrower's annual income

The loan-to-income (LTI) ratio compares the size of the homebuyer's mortgage to their gross income.

You can thank OSFI for this, aka Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions

How is that going to affect you?

Proper pre-approvals, why this is crucial to your success for many reasons.

People often overlook the dangers of waiting to buy real estate in hopes of seeking lower mortgage rates. However, it is generally substantially more expensive to do this, and you don't necessarily qualify for more with a lower rate because the purchase price is substantially higher. Of course, I can't predict the market, but I can tell you I'd be shocked if it didn't go up 10% in the next 12 months.

A purchase price of $1,000,000 with 20% down, a 5% rate, and a 30-year am will result in a monthly payment of $4,270. When that rate is dropped to 4%, the monthly payment is $3,804, a difference of $466.

Now, $466 x 12 months = $5,592 or $27,960 in payment over 5 years (if selecting a 5-year term).

You are far better off buying at a higher rate with the lower purchase price in most circumstances in Greater Vancouver.

In this episode, we review a new-ish plan aimed at finally tackling Canada’s housing crisis. Right now, the government is thinking about how we can build as many homes as fast as possible, and they look to the past to pave the way to the future. Pun intended ;)

In a nutshell, they are creating a catalogue of the pre-approved building designs at the federal level. Now this isn't exactly a fresh new idea, though. After the Second World War, a similar policy was implemented with tremendous success. In 1941, the government set up a company called Wartime Housing Limited. They prepared thousands of identical blueprints and mailed them to builders nationwide. They obviously didn’t have email back then. These cookie-cutter homes were referred to as Strawberry Box Homes or Victory Houses.

Guess how long they took to build? Two months... Two weeks? How about only 36 hours...

Listen and subscribe for more!

👉 Learn more, call Jessi at 604 716 6474, email jessi@jessijohnson.ca or schedule a time to chat here: https://calendly.com/jessirealestate