According to the 2021 demographia median multiple study, Montrealeres making the median local salary now needs 5.6 years of full salary to pay off the median-priced house.
It's considerably higher than in past years, which include 2008 3.9, 2009 4.6, 2010 4.9, 2012 5.1, 2013 5.1, 2014 4.7, 2017 4.8.
Montreal's property price inflation is a nightmare for home shoppers and for realtors, as they pull arrows from their quivers almost all destined to miss.
Very few offers get accepted, as the competition routinely leads residential properties to sell for well above asking price.
A Montreal condo listed at $450,000, for example, could easily go for $530,000 as competition remains fierce. Some properties have gone $200,000 over asking.
The places where you get the best bang for your buck nowadays, as judged by the ratio of average wage to average house price are: Pittsburgh, 2.6, Rochester, 2.6, Buffalo, 2.9, St. Louis 3.0.
The best deal in Canada is now Edmonton at 3.8. The best deal in the U.K. is Glasgow at 3.8.
The five least affordable? Hong Kong 20.7, Vancouver, 13.0, Sydney Australia 11.8, Auckland New Zealand 10.0 and Toronto, 9.9.
The only way to relieve the pressure is, of course, to build more units. The demographia people have urged various places to loosen restrictions on rezoning non-residential outlying land to residential, in other words, unleash more urban sprawl.
Montreal could also solve many of its problems by making life easier for developers and allowing them to build huge projects that could house tens of thousands of people, without making too much red tape around the process.
Try selling housing growth in the neighborhoods of Montreal, it's just super unpopular. People will vehemently argue that the you build, the more rents go up. It's nuts.
ReplyDeleteBut then, how many people would prefer to live in high-rise "bee hive-type" complexes of the kind you see in cities like Shanghai, etc.?
ReplyDeleteThe root of the problem, of course, is property speculation that unfairly drives up rents. In some areas, governments are clamping down on such speculation that has allowed housing and commercial properties to remain empty for years, thereby pricing the average citizen out of the market. Homes and shops should not be considered as "shares" as in the way the stock market functions or subject to auctioning where the wealthiest can bid while the rest scramble to find a home or place to run a small business without being overcharged with excessive rental demands.
In Vancouver to stop speculation the BC government slapped on a speculation tax and an empty property tax to stifle Chinese speculators that would buy up local properties over asking and let them stay empty till they got their profits. You could not buy an outhouse in Vancouver now. Believe it or not someone in a ritzy neighborhood advertised a 1 bedroom apartment for $650. The only catch was it was a fancy bathroom with a bed in it. I kid you not. Greed has become rampant in our times.
ReplyDeleteDowntown's buildings barely touch 20 stories and the streets feel PACKED. I think we have to realize that Montreal's growth is finite and in many ways should be capped, with an emphasis on quality of life over sheer numbers.
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