Experts say Ontario's wild housing market could soon finally bottom out

Canada’s topsy-turvy housing market may finally be cooling off from the shock of successive interest rate hikes, kind of like how you stop a hard-boiled egg from cooking by dunking it in cold water.

Ontario has proven a hotspot in runaway housing prices through the madness of the last decade or so, and that same sustained price acceleration has given the market plenty of altitude to fall from.

But according to the latest Monthly Housing Update published by RBC Economics, the massive price corrections witnessed nationwide and right here in Ontario could soon hit rock bottom.

The report acknowledges that “the swing in the market over the past year has been nothing short of spectacular,” noting how the previous year “started extremely overheated as exceptionally low interest rates, changing housing needs and elevated investor involvement supercharged demand.”

“But the Bank of Canada’s aggressive hike campaign beginning in March triggered a massive correction. It resulted in monthly activity falling nearly 40% to the lowest levels in more than a decade (excluding the pandemic lockdown period) by the fall.”

RBC suggests that “a cyclical bottom is approaching — likely in early 2023,” as housing markets across Canada reel from the chain of successive interest rate hikes in 2022 and the resulting skyrocketing mortgage payments.

It attributes this forecast to a slight uptick in month-over-month activity for the second time in three months but warns that there is still some room for prices to decline further in the weeks and months to come.

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The report says that after 10 straight months of declines in the Canadian MLS Home Price Index, continued declines are expected until the spring at the earliest “as poor affordability continues to weigh heavily on buyers.”

Some of the most substantial price corrections have been occurring in Ontario markets, though the report notes a recent trend of stabilization is widespread from coast to coast, including right here in Canada’s most-populous province.

a few interesting graphs from RBC Economics released today. pic.twitter.com/gUyxoicLUE

— daniel de melis (@d_demelis) January 17, 2023

“Activity is levelling off in the majority of local markets, including Toronto and the rest of southern Ontario,” states the RBC report.

Nationwide, the MLS Home Price Index has fallen 13% since peaking in February 2022, though some markets in Ontario have experienced declines in excess of 20%, including Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo, Cambridge, Brantford, and London. Toronto prices declined by 14% during the same period.

Home resales fell off a cliff nationwide in 2022, declining by a staggering 25% and erasing gains made over the two previous years. And it was much worse in Ontario, where demand dropped by 32%, outpaced by only British Columbia at 35%.

Resales only dropped by 1.8% in Alberta, so maybe that entirely cringy ad campaign attempting to lure Ontarians out west might have actually been working.