Tausi Insider

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. says the annual pace of housing starts slowed in October from its high for the year reached in September. The national housing agency says the seasonally adjusted annual rate of housing starts in October was 267,055 units, down 11 per cent from 298,811 units in September. The annual pace of urban starts was down 11 per cent at 245,234 units in October as multi-unit urban starts fell 13 per cent to 188,189 units. Urban starts of single-detached homes dropped four per cent to 57,045 units. CMHC says the annual pace of starts was down in Toronto and Vancouver, however Montreal posted an increase. Rural starts were estimated at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 21,821. The six-month moving average of the monthly seasonally adjusted annual rate was 277,667 units in October, up 0.5 per cent from 276,374 in September. https://www.tausiinsider.com/annual-pace-of-housing-starts-in-canada-slowed-in-october/?feed_id=350691&_unique_id=648a5981c56e0

A tradesperson works on a balcony at a condo tower under construction, in Burnaby, B.C., on March 2. DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press Brent Sawchyn is chief executive officer of PC Urban Properties, a real estate development company based in Vancouver. Housing supply and affordability is one of the leading issues across Canada, and the situation is particularly dire in Vancouver. We all recognize this, particularly developers, who for the most part are trying to be part of the solution. Here’s the foundation of the problem. With increasing development cost charges, property taxes, municipal charges, utility costs and GST on new rental buildings, developers typically spend at least 15 per cent to 20 per cent of our total project budget on these government-level taxes. And with all the red tape, we face a four- to six-year pathway to deliver much-needed rental housing. For all of that, municipalities and the provincial and federal governments pay lip service to do more to help, but in re...

Canadian shoppers are out deal-hunting during a muted Black Friday as decades-high inflation weighs on consumers and prompts some to rein in spending. Retailers have stretched deals over several weeks and offered similar discounts online, taking some of the frenzy out of the holiday shopping event. Several big box stores in the Toronto area, such as Best Buy and Walmart, lacked the usual early morning lineups that once epitomized Black Friday. Malls in the area appeared busy around lunchtime, but not swarming with the crowds and queues seen in previous years. Few stores appeared to have lines of waiting customers. “We’re seeing a dilution of Black Friday as a physical shopping event where you go to the store early in the morning,” retail analyst Bruce Winder said Friday. “It’s finally sort of hit that tipping point where it’s much less about the day and it’s more about the shopping period.” Inflation-weary shoppers were expected to turn out in record numbers for deals on Black Friday...

Office vacancy rates in downtown Toronto and Vancouver are climbing quickly, as well-known businesses such as Plenty of Fish, Air Miles and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP try to get rid of unneeded space amid the shift to remote work and economic uncertainty. Toronto’s vacancy rate reached 15 per cent at the end of September, according to new data from commercial real estate firm Altus Group. That is up from 4.2 per cent in 2019 prior to the start of the pandemic. The current level tops vacancies during the Great Recession and marks the highest since 2003 when Toronto was dealing with the aftermath of the dot-com bubble and the vacancy rate was 13.3 per cent. In Vancouver, the vacancy rate hit a two-decade high at 11.5 per cent, according to Altus. That compares to 3.5 per cent in 2019. Both cities’ downtowns hollowed out during the pandemic with office employees working from home. At the same time, a slew of new skyscrapers opened and flooded the cities with new office space. Today, bus...

Hybrid workplaces are now ubiquitous as a byproduct of the pandemic. KAITI SULLIVAN/The New York Times News Service Mary Ann Yule is the chief executive and president of HP Canada. When I was raising my two boys and trying to advance my career in tech, I often faced seemingly impossible choices. Trying to juggle drop-offs, school events, sports and other family activities with travel, meetings and work at the office – it seemed like I could never do enough. That level of pressure can take a heavy toll. I have seen women pass up projects and promotions and even leave promising careers because of the balancing act required. Today, though, hybrid workplaces are ubiquitous as a byproduct of the pandemic. More professional women have an opportunity to re-enter the workplace on their terms, while improving the balance between their work and home lives. As we continue to edge toward a new normal, some particularly loud voices in the tech industry have begun to call for a return to the offic...

Toronto home prices dropped in November, the eighth consecutive monthly decline since the Bank of Canada started reducing the supply of cheap credit. But new listings of properties continued to drop, suggesting homeowners are weathering sharp jumps in interest rates and have not been forced to sell their homes. The home price index was $1,089,800, a 1-per-cent decline from October, according to the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB). The index, which excludes sales of extremely expensive homes and is the industry’s preferred measure of home prices, is down 5.5 per cent compared with November of last year. Activity continued to wane, with higher borrowing costs pricing many prospective buyers out of the market. Fewer of them are able to qualify for a mortgage large enough to afford homes in the Toronto region, the country’s second-most expensive real estate market after Vancouver. That, in turn, has reduced competition and made homeowners reluctant to put their properties up f...

Dozens of migrant workers in Vancouver have allegedly been defrauded of thousands of dollars by an immigration consultant who promised the workers permanent residency through a federal immigration program that the workers say did not exist. The alleged scam is now the subject of a potential class-action suit that is making its way through the B.C. court system. The lawsuit contends that the actions of the alleged perpetrator of the scam were not only financially ruinous for the workers – most of them migrants from Mexico – but resulted in some of them unknowingly working without visas while waiting for their work permits to be processed. This meant that they were losing their opportunity to apply for genuine immigration status in Canada. The Vancouver-based immigration consultant who is being accused by workers of fraud, Liza Lucion, was indefinitely suspended by the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants (CICC) – the regulatory body for immigration consultants – this pas...

Dozens of migrant workers in Vancouver have allegedly been defrauded of thousands of dollars by an immigration consultant who promised the workers permanent residency through a federal immigration program that the workers say did not exist. The alleged scam is now the subject of a potential class-action suit that is making its way through the B.C. court system. The lawsuit contends that the actions of the alleged perpetrator of the scam were not only financially ruinous for the workers – most of them migrants from Mexico – but resulted in some of them unknowingly working without visas while waiting for their work permits to be processed. This meant that they were losing their opportunity to apply for genuine immigration status in Canada. The Vancouver-based immigration consultant who is being accused by workers of fraud, Liza Lucion, was indefinitely suspended by the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants (CICC) – the regulatory body for immigration consultants – this pas...

If an employer is facing a “shortage” of workers, there is a simple solution: offer higher wages. Fred Lum/the Globe and Mail Don Wright is a fellow with the Public Policy Forum and a former deputy minister to the premier and head of the public service in British Columbia. He has held senior executive positions in business, government and academia. For almost 50 years Canada has done a thoroughly crappy job – to use the technical term in economics – of fostering a labour market that would provide for steady, year-over-year increases in real pay for working Canadians. I calculate that in 1976 it would have taken a worker earning the median employment income six years to save enough for a down payment on a typical single-family home. In 2020 it would have taken 17 years. If that worker lived in Greater Toronto or Vancouver, it would have taken 28 and 30 years, respectively. Given this history, one might think that governments would welcome the prospect of a change in labour market dyna...

Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem conducts an end-of-year fireside chat with the Business Council of British Columbia, in Vancouver, on Dec. 12. JENNIFER GAUTHIER/Reuters Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem said there is a “greater risk” of not doing enough to tackle inflation than doing too much and damaging economic growth, even as the bank has signalled that it is nearing the end of its aggressive rate-hike cycle. In a year-end speech in Vancouver, Mr. Macklem reiterated that the central bank has entered a new phase of monetary policy. After raising interest rates seven consecutive times, the bank has moved from asking how big the next rate hike should be to asking whether to raise interest rates at all. That could mean a pause to rate increases as early as January. But Mr. Macklem also suggested that the bank remains concerned about throwing in the towel too early. The annual rate of inflation was 6.9 per cent in October, still more than three times the bank’s 2-per-cent infl...

Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem conducts an end-of-year fireside chat with the Business Council of British Columbia, in Vancouver, on Dec. 12. JENNIFER GAUTHIER/Reuters Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem said there is a “greater risk” of not doing enough to tackle inflation than doing too much and damaging economic growth, even as the bank has signalled that it is nearing the end of its aggressive rate-hike cycle. In a year-end speech in Vancouver, Mr. Macklem reiterated that the central bank has entered a new phase of monetary policy. After raising interest rates seven consecutive times, the bank has moved from asking how big the next rate hike should be to asking whether to raise interest rates at all. That could mean a pause to rate increases as early as January. But Mr. Macklem also suggested that the bank remains concerned about throwing in the towel too early. The annual rate of inflation was 6.9 per cent in October, still more than three times the bank’s 2-per-cent infl...

Royal LePage is forecasting the aggregate price of a home in Canada will drop by one per cent to $765,171 by the fourth quarter of 2023. The real estate company says it expects prices to flatten in the second quarter and then modestly increase in the second half of the year, ending 2023 on an upward trajectory. Its calculations show the median price of a single-family detached property will fall by two per cent to $781,256 and condominiums will slide one per cent to $568,933 by the end of next year. Royal LePage attributes its predictions to declining affordability, which has been exacerbated by rising interest rates, and continued housing supply shortages, which are acting like a floor on home price declines. It foresees homes in Vancouver remaining the most expensive in 2023, dipping only one per cent next year to more than $1.2-million. Regina will be the most affordable of the places it studied as aggregate home prices will fall 1.5 per cent to $361,495 by the end of 2023. The Ca...

The average monthly cost to rent a home in Canada rose to a record $2,024 in November, new data show, and experts say this trend is showing no signs of stopping. The National Rental Report published Tuesday said the average price for rent in November was up 2.5 per cent compared with the month before. On average, renters are paying $224 more per month compared with a year ago, for a gain of 12.4 per cent. Explainer: Low-income renters in Canada can apply for a one-time payment of $500. Here’s what you need to know According to the report, the average cost of rent surpassed pre-pandemic prices by 10.5 per cent. While the average price for a one-bedroom rose 8.3 per cent in November to $1,710, two-bedroom rentals had the biggest spike, up 11.7 per cent from last year to $2,090. “Rents in Canada are rising at an exceptionally high speed, which is having a profound effect on housing affordability as interest rates continue to rise,” said Shaun Hildebrand, president of Urbanation, in a ne...

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. says the annual pace of housing starts in November edged down 0.2 per cent compared with October. The national housing agency says the seasonally adjusted annual rate of housing starts in November was 264,159 units, down from 264,581 in October. The result came as the annual pace of urban starts was flat at 242,644 units as multi-unit urban starts rose two per cent to 190,415, but single-detached urban starts fell seven per cent to 52,229. The annual pace of starts in Toronto and Vancouver rose, but Montreal saw a drop. Rural starts were estimated at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 21,515. The six-month moving average of the monthly seasonally adjusted annual rates of housing starts was 274,361 in November, down from 277,044 in October. https://www.tausiinsider.com/annual-pace-of-housing-starts-in-canada-edged-down-in-november-cmhc-says/?feed_id=328182&_unique_id=641c26e84861b

SemiosBio CEO and founder Michael Gilbert. Handout The founder of Canada’s largest agriculture technology company, Vancouver’s SemiosBio Technologies Inc., is resigning as chief executive after deciding he prefers to govern companies, not run them. Michael Gilbert will step down on Dec. 31 to focus on his board positions including his roles at Semios and two Canadian startups in which he has invested, including seaweed farming company Casacadia Seaweed Corp. The medical researcher-turned-entrepreneur, who owns between 20 and 30 per cent of Semios, told the board of his desire for change in early fall. “I find myself more interested in governance than operations,” Mr. Gilbert, 49, said in an interview. “It is difficult to do both. I want to make sure I don’t get in my own way. Given where my heart is at, I want to find a CEO who’s really driven about operations who can take this company to the next level, because it’s in my best interest.” Mr. Gilbert, who has the right to name two of...