Measures coming to cool housing
The province of Ontario, where the red-hot Toronto housing market is located, will unveil a suite of 10 different measures to control housing prices, according to a report from the Toronto Star.
The plan could come as soon as tomorrow and is expected to include rent controls, some type of levy on housing speculators, potentially a vacancy tax, rules to curb bidding wars and measures to discourage foreign buyers.
Housing prices in the Toronto area have risen around 30% in the past year and that's following many years of strong increases. Toronto house prices have doubled since 2008 and tripled since 1999 according to the Teranet index.
The City of Toronto and the federal government are also mulling over options to cool the housing market.
The problem here is that governments are notoriously bad at this kind of thing and only tend to act too late or at the very peak. Often they move too aggressively and flush a market that was poised for a correction.
We'll wait for the details but from the sounds of things, indications are that they're taking a sledge hammer to it. If it cracks, the market will get its money out of CAD and ask questions later.
