🏗️Builder Bailout or Buyer Boost? The Truth About Canada’s Housing Market Right Now

Added: 2026-05-08

[00:00:01][music] >> Welcome to this week's episode of the Move Smartly Show. This week we decided to record in studio with myself and David Ackman from Relosophy. David, thanks for joining me. Thank you. How you doing? Very good, very good. So today we're going to be chatting, going over some of the questions I get every month from viewers and from listeners. I mean, obviously of course thank you for sending them in. They're always good questions. So today we're going to go through each of your questions, ones that I got over the past month, to unpack some of the concerns and and I guess just general questions about the market people had. So David, I'm going to pass it over to you to kick off with our first one. Okay, let's go.

[00:00:42]Number one.

[00:00:44]Some people are calling the HST rebate on new homes a builder bailout. But if it lowers prices for buyers, isn't that a good thing?

[00:00:52]Why are critics framing it that way and who actually benefits most from this policy? That's a good question. So this has been in the news a fair bit. So for those of you who aren't familiar, the federal government, the provincial government just announced, you know, over the past couple months that they will be waving the HST on new homes. So traditionally builders need to pay HST on new homes. Usually that is included in the purchase price. And the government said that they are going to be waving that up to the first million or so.

[00:01:22]So it's about $130,000. Now, on new homes it is a different thing obviously for pre-construction, the builder might lower the price and sell those units at a at a price that people can actually afford. But the bailout idea really has to do with there's kind of two segments of the market, not the pre-construction but more so all of the existing units that have been built and houses, tens of thousands of them that are sitting there empty that builders can't sell at the price they need to sell to make a profit. And this is where the kind of HST bailout comes in. So imagine I'm a builder, I built a home, I completed it and I need to sell it for a million bucks to make a profit. But the market has declined, prices have fallen by 20% and I can't get a million anymore, I can only get 800,000. So in a market like that, the builders aren't budging, they're not selling their properties. They're just sitting there empty for the most part.

[00:02:18]So basically what the government said, you know what, we'll help the builders out. We'll cut you a check for 130 grand. So instead of listing it for a million, you list it for 870 and you know, maybe instead of 870 you get 850 or 840, the buyer comes up a little bit, you find, you know, meet something in the middle and you find a price that works. So certainly buyers can can purchase those homes and they're benefiting benefiting it to some extent. But at the end of the day, it's not really a consumer benefit.

[00:02:45]The buyer's paying market prices and in some ways a little bit of a premium. The real beneficiary of this of course are the builders who you know, in a normal market, you know, that home that the builder can't sell for a million bucks eventually is going to fall in price either because the builder can't sit on it for five years empty. So they're either going to reduce it gradually and not make a profit or lose a little bit of money or it might go to power of sale in which case they default and the bank takes it over.

[00:03:16]But the government's decided to avoid both of those options by basically kind of having taxpayers fund that decline so builders can sell at at a discount and and still maintain their profit. Keep in mind that's what's going on here. So the builders maintain as much of the profit as possible, taxpayers are funding the difference. And so this is why, you know, a lot of people are framing this as a as a builder bailout because it's effectively the government subsidizing these purchases. You know, if you think about it another way, imagine there was tens of thousands of senior citizens who wanted needed to sell their home at the peak 2020 prices because that's what they needed to fund their retirements and they weren't budging on their price.

[00:03:56]Well, that's kind of what the builders are like. They need to sell at 2020 to peak prices to fund their profits and their businesses. So, you know, if we had all these seniors who weren't selling, you know, imagine the government came in and said we're going to cut you a check for $130,000 each to lower your prices so you can sell those houses. This obviously would benefit those people who are holding out for max prices. The only difference with my analogy instead of being tens of thousands of households, it is hundreds of builders with tens of thousands of units. And instead of the government cutting a check, they're just foregoing HST income that they would have received. So it's still billions of dollars that the government is giving up. And I think the big issue with a lot of this is that a lot of pundits and economists are framing this as some like social justice issue, it's benefiting the consumer and it's solving our housing crisis and it's all BS. It is not a consumer-centric policy.

[00:04:51]It doesn't mean you won't benefit if you buy one, but at the end of the day, you're like I said, you're buying at market prices if not a premium. The benefit are is to the builders who basically can sell those units and still maintain a decent profit or in some cases just rent them out because currently if they decided and this deals with a lot of condominium corporate a lot of condominium builders, if they just couldn't sell their units and decided to rent them out, they would have to pay HST on those units because the second you rent it, it's no longer new, it's considered a deemed sale. So they would have to pay HST. So now with the HST rebate, those builders can say, you know what, I'm not even going to sell at all. I'm actually going to try to wait to maximize my sale price. I'm just going to rent it out for five years. So they are benefiting as well.

[00:05:37]So again, back to the question, the main beneficiaries quite frankly are are the builders who are getting billions of dollars in subsidies effectively for their businesses. Yeah, and those builders as well, it's not as though it's unlocking tons of inventory because builders are smart, they want to make money. They're going to phase the inventory. They're going to put out 10 of the same model at once in one location, they're going to do one. Yeah.

[00:06:00]And then one. They can kind of control the market, control the prices so the market price stays relatively the same.

[00:06:05]They have to pop them all on the same time and of course competition would drive it or the lack of competition and supply would drive it down. Yeah, I mean and in some cases they're not even hitting the market. Like in the case of condos, thousands of them are being basically bought now by these private equity firms that are pooling hundreds of millions of dollars. There's one that basically got $300 million from the provincial government to buy thousands of these condo units that are off-market and they're buying them in bulk. So again, they're getting discounted prices that the average consumer can't get. And I think this is one of the problems I have with all of these policies. Listen, at the end of the day, when capitalist system breaks, we turn to sort of governments subsidizing the people that were profiting off of housing. So now province Ontario is building a fund to buy up all these condos, federal and provincial government giving tax subsidies to builders. And listen, business is a risky business and you know, sometimes you you have a loss. But with what the governments are trying to do is effectively bail out the builders to basically help them kind of get through this slow down. That's right. That's is it socialized gains, private losses or something?

[00:07:14]>> Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:07:15]All right, perfect. Let's go Socialize the losses. That's exactly it. Yeah, yeah. All right, let's go to question two. I sold my home and tried to buy again, but sellers aren't accepting lower offers. So I may need to rent for now. With the new HST rebate making pre-construction look more attractive, I'm considering that option. But I'm also worried about a potential recession and further price declines. Should I consider buying pre-con now or wait and see where the market goes?

[00:07:41]So and this is a good question. So pre-con is less of a, you know, before we even get into the question, it's less of a bailout for builders because those builders are sitting on products that they can't sell, say at a million bucks because the market is only 850. So the reduction in HST actually allows them to lower the price, to actually build them at a price that consumers will pay. So some people, some buyers are starting to look at buying pre-construction housing because the prices are coming down a little bit. Should you do it? I mean, the challenge is it's still quite risky. You know, if you are a buyer considering buying pre-construction, you want to buy in a project that you're confident will be completed. You know, one of the risks of course of pre-construction is that if it's a big development, the the builder doesn't sell enough units or houses, the project might not even be built. So if it's a small project with a quick timeline, it's lower risk. If it has hundreds of units that need to sell, higher risk. You know, the other of course concern is well, what happens between now and by the time that the home is completed a year, year and a half or two years from now, where are prices? Again, you know, there's a risk that prices may in fact be lower. So the the home you're buying for a million bucks today might only be worth 900,000 a year from now or a year and a half from now. And in that case, you have a hard time getting financing. The bank is only going to finance typically what you paid for it, not what it's, sorry, they will finance what it's worth, not what you paid for it. So you would have to potentially come up with an extra $100,000 in the difference. Now, the difference is if you buy an existing home, yeah, your home can still go down in value. But once you have it and you have your mortgage and you're making your payments, there's less of that appraisal risk where you have to cough up an extra $100,000 just in order to close. So there are still risks and there's no real solid answer. I mean, you just have to be comfortable with the risks if you're buying pre-construction today.

[00:09:31]Yeah, I mean, we will there is actually a question about this later, but blanket appraisal. So we'll we'll get on to that for sure soon enough. But let's go to question three then.

[00:09:43]My father's agent listed his home well below what he'd expected in order to try to create a bidding war. How effective is that strategy in today's market? And if we're not happy with how the home is being presented, like the listing photos, what recourse do we have with the agent?

[00:09:58]So, you know, this is a great question.

[00:10:00]Um a couple of things to keep in mind here.

[00:10:04]And I get these questions a lot from people who again have parents who are selling their home, their agents are a little bit pushy, uh pushing a certain strategy on them. And in this case, a strategy to price low with a bidding war. Uh the reality is some agents do this quite frankly cuz they're lazy in some cases and just want to sell the home ASAP. Pricing low to get multiple offers is not necessarily the best strategy uh in today's market in most neighborhoods. And I would say maybe 85 to 90% of areas in the GTA. There are some neighborhoods uh and I've written about this and talked about it on our on the show in central Toronto from like, you know, Leslieville, Riverdale, uh Davisville, Bloor West, some of these areas that are surprisingly still relatively competitive in today's market. That is normally a very slow market where prices are softening. These areas uh are still getting tons of offers on their offer nights.

[00:11:07]It's pretty competitive. Some are selling for bully bully offers. We had a client that just competed on a home in Davisville. I think they had like 10 offers on it, you know, 2 days ago. So, it's still a it's a competitive market in many of these neighborhoods. However, if you're in Scarborough, Etobicoke, or in the suburbs, it's generally not very competitive. Uh and the person who emailed me cuz I connected with them and followed up with them cuz they were kind of going through this urgently and needed a quite you know, answers to their question. Uh I think they're the property was in Scarborough. So, it's less likely to get, you know, a bidding war in that area. Again, I don't want to say absolute, depends on the property, but in most cases it's not a bidding war type home. On top of that actually, now that I remember, the person mentioned to me that it's it's an older home. I think it's dad's home. It's not, you know, it's not like a modern renovated turnkey home that you're going to get a ton of first-time buyers competing for. It's older. It's dated. Those homes are not getting uh bidding wars in today's market. Like those ones typically sit on the market longer. There's less interest. And the problem, the risk when you price low and try to get a bidding war is this let's just say you're worth a million and you price it for, you know, 900,000.

[00:12:17]Well, on your offer date, you're going to get a lot of you know, you might be might get two or three offers, but they're all going to be around 900,000 or 880. You know, everyone looking for a deal. Um you know, and then you could have an agent saying, "Well, that's the best we got. Take it or leave it." And that is obviously not the best strategy.

[00:12:34]So, with with properties like this, you should be pricing closer to what they're worth uh rather than you know, listing them low for an offer date. Uh the other question was all about photos and marketing. You know, again, certainly here I think it's, you know, you got to think about it this way. It is your home, you know what I mean? You're it's it's it's worth a lot of money. You're paying your agent a lot of money to market it. And if you're not happy with the marketing, the photos, I would not just sit there quietly and let them proceed. I would just hit pause. At the end of the day, you can decide when your home hits the market even if you've signed a listing agreement to say we're going on the market on Tuesday.

[00:13:13]On Monday, you could say, "I've changed my mind. I don't like this marketing.

[00:13:16]We're not listing. Suspend the listing until you fix your uh photos and make them a little bit more professional."

[00:13:22]Because a lot of agents I'd hate to say it. I mean, a lot of them are pretty cheap, you know? And then they'll like, you know, you'll get photographers who charge like 100 bucks.

[00:13:32]And you'll have professional photographers who charge 400 bucks a shoot, right? And a lot of agents will go for the cheapest photographer who's in and out in 10 minutes.

[00:13:41]And the photos look like a photographer who's in and out in 10 minutes versus someone who you paid a lot for who spends an hour setting up and photographing rooms professionally. So, um if the agency is the cheapest photographer possible, it's going to be pretty obvious. And I would push back and make sure that the home is marketed well personally. Yeah. And I mean, and to you know, protect oneself against the you know, dubious listing practices like a economy strategy which would be listing in a in an area that just doesn't warrant it or or our home.

[00:14:12]Um you know, such is the case now, you can see sold prices of many homes. I would encourage every seller to look at those homes and ask their potential selling agent "How are these homes marketed? How were they sold? Yeah. Were they sold with a successful offer night? When that figure is zero for your neighborhood and for your home type, well, you probably shouldn't do Yeah. offer night.

[00:14:33]>> 100%. You're right. We have we have evidence to use evidence-based decision-making. It makes it, you know, much much easier. I mean, if you're right now, if you're not a B+ home or better, you may not sell at all.

[00:14:44]>> Yeah. Let alone have a have an offer night. So, you have to be just honest with yourself, uh have your agent do the homework. And you know what? The onus can be on the seller as well to do do some homework as well Yeah.

[00:14:53]We have that ability. And uh I think just to uh have your agent have some accountability, they should be asking uh these questions. Yes. I mean, so I'll expand on that cuz I think it's an important point. So, when we think about what type of questions you should be asking, when we're listing homes even in areas that are normally competitive, we don't just assume, "Okay, it's competitive. These three homes sold for asking. We should list low as well." Uh you you actually have to do a little bit more research. And what I mean by that is as a seller, what you want to say to your agent is what are the last five or six homes that have sold in my area that are similar to mine?

[00:15:30]How much were they listed for? How much did they sell for? And if they sold for over asking, how many offers did they get? Because this is all extremely relevant. So, if we're I'm in we're in Leslieville right now. So, if we have a client is listing a home, you know, we could have called maybe four of those five had multiple sold for over asking. And when we called them, they all got between six and 10 offers.

[00:15:52]But fast forward 2 months once we hit sort of June, July, you could still see five very similar homes that sold, you know, three of the five selling for over asking. But when we call those agents, the feedback might be "We only got one offer. We're really lucky." Or we got two offers rather than five, six, or seven offers. So, if you're in that later stage of the season where yeah, homes are selling for over asking, but purely by luck cuz they only got one offer, two offers, and those buyers happen to bid what the seller wanted, you know, you may want to adjust your strategy and not market even though it's typically competitive neighborhood, you may want to just list for what you're worth because the momentum in the market isn't there. So, it's not just seeing what home sold for or how much they sold for over asking, it's understanding how many offers each agent had. And this you have to do you have to call everybody. I mean, it takes work. Most agents, like I said, are lazy, quite frankly. But you have to call every single agent.

[00:16:49]>> want to pick up the phone. They don't want to pick up the phone. Most agents don't want to pick up the phone. But like you only get the best information when you call. You call all five of those agents. And you know what? You ask them what their showing traffic was like. How many showings did they have?

[00:17:01]Um what did it exceed what they were expecting? How many offers? You know, all of that. And most agents are very professional. When you call them, they will tell you. They're open. The problem is most listing agents don't pick up the phone to get that information. They just make those decisions blind. So, as a as a seller, I think these are the questions that you should be asking before deciding what to list your price your home at because again, at the end of the day, the agent can give you their opinion, but it's ultimately your property and you can decide what to sell it at or what to list it at. So, I think that's an important consideration. Yeah. And to make a final point, if the listing agent or yourself says, "Why don't we give it a try? Why don't we under list? You know, maybe we'll catch lightning in a bottle." Um if you do try that in an area in a home that is just frankly not going to work, uh what you're doing is you're setting the stage for everyone to know that there is no appetite for your property.

[00:17:54]And then you get that stigmatized uh property that has been, you know, they tried an offer night.

[00:17:59]They've re-listed. And now they're just kind of sitting there. So, you've you've wasted a week on on the market. So, that's another reason not to not do it that way if for sure if it's not warranted at all.

[00:18:08]>> Yeah. Absolutely. All right. Let's move on to question four.

[00:18:12]Uh John, this is right to you. Why are you against blanket appraisals? Okay.

[00:18:18]Okay.

[00:18:18]>> Some argue they help maintain confidence in the market. And did you want to explain blanket appraisals? Yeah. Maybe let's talk about what blanket appraisals are first. Okay. Let's ask that question. A blanket appraisal So, we got to think about how most home purchases work. If you go to buy a home for a million dollars and the bank appraises it at 900,000, it doesn't matter that you qualified to spend up to a million, the bank's only going to give you a mortgage based on the 900,000. They're going to say, "We're only going to financing based on what it's worth, not what you paid." You have to find an extra 100,000 dollars over and above your down payment now to cover the difference between what you paid for it and what it's worth. That is how a normal mortgage works.

[00:19:03]Now, there's one segment of the market where that's starting to fall apart, and that is with pre-constructed newly completed condominiums. So, what's happening with a lot of these condos is you have investors who paid a million bucks for the condo, and the bank's coming in and saying, "Well, it's only worth 800 grand actually."

[00:19:23]In that case, technically, it doesn't matter that the investor already put down 200,000, 20 20% of the million, the that investor would need to come up with an extra 20% of the new value of the 800,000. So, their first 200 grand just goes to cover the loss in value.

[00:19:43]Now they need an extra 160 on the new appraised value 160 in theory. So, they got to come up with extra 160,000 dollars. That is what normally happen in that scenario. But what banks have been doing over the past couple of years and I posted about it on our show is they're they're creating something called blanket appraisals, which is basically closing their eyes and pretending that that that new condo is actually worth what the investor paid for it rather than the market value. So they're appraising blanket appraising it at a million dollars. So that investor doesn't have to come up with any extra capital.

[00:20:21]So with that said, maybe follow up on the question. What was the question about what why? To describe why they do that is that, you know, the person who's loaning on the construction project um they want to take a $400 million problem and chop it up into 400 $1 million problems.

[00:20:37]Well, that's exactly it. So the the banks that are usually doing this also have the construction loan. The construction loan could be $400 million as Devin said. So that is the big issue.

[00:20:46]If too many people can't close on their units and get financing, the project collapses and the bank doesn't get all of their $400 million bucks back. So the bank is basically, like Devin said, taking this big $400 million construction problem and chopping up to a bunch of smaller problems for each individual investor.

[00:21:05]So this is why the banks are doing that.

[00:21:07]Even though it technically baked breaks banking guidelines and regulations and they're starting to slow that down, but that's what they've been doing for 2 years.

[00:21:16]So here, why are you against blanket appraisals? Some argue they help maintain confidence in the market and protect both buyers and builders.

[00:21:23]Without them, could we see more failed closing, bankruptcies, and fewer builders delivering new housing?

[00:21:30]So of course, I mean so this is you I mean this person's point touches on exactly why the government or the banks or the governments are turning a blind eye and why the banks are doing it. They're basically trying to prevent condo projects from failing.

[00:21:45]Um why am I against it?

[00:21:48]I mean I think for the most part, I'm generally against policies that uh interventions that protect investors who are speculating in housing, protect businesses from their ordinary operations of their businesses.

[00:22:05]At the end of the day, if you're an investor, you make a business decision and you make a financial bet. And if that bet doesn't pay out, I don't expect the government to bail me out or uh you know, help me out with my decision. I generally don't. I feel bad for the people who made those bad decisions, but the fact is all the evidence was there 5 years ago.

[00:22:26]Um if anyone who wanted to do any research, the fact that these were extremely risky investments was obvious.

[00:22:33]I wrote I have a post on our blog from 2020. I unpacked every reason why it's a high-risk bet. The appreciation is unlikely to happen. The rents are almost never going to hit the level that they need to hit to justify the price where people It was all obvious, but people were buying them because they were sold this idea that they're a get-rich-quick scheme, right?

[00:22:54]So they weren't and they failed, which means yes, a lot of people who are in those situations may lose money and that's not great, but at the end of the day again, I don't think I I don't think it's great to intervene when you're protecting the very people who were speculating in housing and driving home prices up higher than they otherwise should be. So, you know, and we all have our biases. I'm not against government interventions. I'm generally speaking more in favor of government interventions that help sort of the average person rather than businesses in their ordinary operation or people speculating in housing. So if we're intervening on anyone, I I don't think it should be the latter two. I think, you know, protecting and doing what you can to protect the average citizen more so is an intervention I'm more fine with, but that's not what's going on here. This is more about protecting and let's be fair, not even the speculators.

[00:23:45]It's more about protecting banks um first and then kind of investor second.

[00:23:51]Yeah, I mean the the everyday buyer kind of comes comes last. Although they are looped in with the with the investors, but I'm not sure if there could be a policy that would necessarily parse out investor versus No, for that that would just cause a for sure real a real a real pile up.

[00:24:07]Um maybe in a in a perfect world. Let's go to question five.

[00:24:11]Okay, there's a view that builders might buy back their own unsold units to take advantage of HST rules and rent them out.

[00:24:19]But wouldn't make more sense to just lower prices and sell?

[00:24:22]Why would a builder take on the risk of being a landlord in a weakening rental market?

[00:24:26]>> Okay, I need to unpack this. So this goes back to kind of the the again announcement about HST rebates and how builders will adjust to them. And I touched on it earlier that we might have some builders who refuse to sell today and and decide to rent them out. So a couple of things on that. Number one, like I said earlier, in the past or before this HST change, no builder would do that because they'd have to pay HST the second they rented it out, which further bakes into their cost of the home and what they need to sell it for.

[00:24:59]So no one's doing that.

[00:25:00]Why would a builder rent out their units today rather than just sell it at a lower price?

[00:25:06]The reality is they may not be able to sell it at the price that they needs to to actually, you know, make a reasonable profit or margin or even break even. So the gap between what a lot of these new buildings sold for pre-construction and what they're actually worth is way more than the HST reduction. So meaning, you know, let's just say the builder needs to sell that unit for 1,700 bucks a square foot, but the market price for it is 1,250 or 1,300 bucks a square foot.

[00:25:38]Knocking off 10 or 13% is not going to bridge that gap. So the builder has to decide either they're just going to throw in the towel and even with the reduction still lose hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit and cut their losses or they're just going to take it a loan and finance them and carry them and rent them and hope the market recovers 5 years from now. So again, it's a business decision some uh condo corporations are making.

[00:26:08]Why would they do that? Like I said, because in some cases they just can't drop the price enough to actually make the numbers work. So some that are well-capitalized perhaps are just deciding to hang on rather than take that loss today.

[00:26:21]Uh so again, it's building specific and builder specific. Any builder where they could drop the price to a level that someone will buy in the mar you know, you know, their their inventory will clear will of course do that. I think that is probably in most builders' situations their first option. And and like I said, some are just selling them in bulk to private equity funds buying thousands of units um and that's the path they're taking. I'm sure some builders don't even want to go that route to sell to private equity.

[00:26:50]Uh and again, every builder has their own policies, but the key is what is the gap between what they need to sell at and the market price and if it's too wide, the HST doesn't help them that much. It helps them a little bit because it allows them to rent it, but it's not going to get them to sell it at a price that they need.

[00:27:07]>> Yeah, and then builders are not in the business of being being landlords. Yeah.

[00:27:11]Um that's not something you want to get forced forced into necessarily. If that was the case, they would build purpose-built rental housing and pass that to a, you know, it would be a maybe an investment like a right door to a a management management company. So um you know, we've had a lot of talk of the HST rebate and it sounds like it seems to be, you know, benefiting builders more than than end users and and and consumers. I think this is like our sixth question via either >> lot, yeah, for sure. on the live. It's it's really top of mind for a lot of people and I think the reason is they maybe people feel it's going to unlock a lot of inventory. It's really going to help the pre-construction or not pre-construction, the the I guess the built >> Yeah. uh market and it's not really being the so much the case. Yeah. No.

[00:27:56]And and listen, I think let's not misinterpret anything. Like yes, some buyers are going to go out and buy a pre a new construction home. So yes, some may benefit. But when we talk about the beneficiary of the tax rebate, it is not really the buyer because you're still paying market prices. You're not getting a discount. The person really benefiting, like we said, are the builders. Um and yeah, I think it is top of mind for a lot of consumers. Listen, some consumers might take advantage because they want to buy a new home and will still pay a bit of a premium for that new home that's sitting and again in the suburbs uh empty waiting to be purchased. Some might buy a new construction condominium. I think yes, so I think it is top of mind for a lot of people who are looking for housing and looking for options.

[00:28:43]Uh you know, they framed it as sort of helping increase supply. I don't think it's going to do that, you know, and and again, going back to what we said, there's kind of two segments of the market. It's how is it going to impact all the new homes that are already built but sitting empty in the builders' inventory and obviously the policy really helps builders. And then how does it help pre-construction or new construction housing?

[00:29:07]And I don't think it's going to have a huge impact on actually building more new homes. I think it might on at the margins. Some may be able to reduce their prices enough to make it work. I spoke with some builders recently about a really interesting project uh in downtown Toronto. It's a small project.

[00:29:23]It's like, I don't know, 15 townhomes, you know, really nice. And yeah, for them it the HST rebate might get them to build a project where they can price it at a at a price that the market will buy and I think that is excellent. And I think this is the real benefit. So I'm I'm I think the HST rebate is fantastic, certainly when it comes to encouraging new housing. I am conflicted on it, you know, on how it's being used on existing and newly completed houses to be clear. But on the new housing, absolutely, because I think it bridges the gap. I think it makes construction more affordable for builders because they can't sell at the prices today. You know, there's so many high costs in terms of land and construction, and I think reducing the HST and then the city reducing development charges is going to help builders bridge that gap to get new housing built, and I think that is the intended goal of these types of policies.

[00:30:22]>> Yeah.

[00:30:22]You create my own little spin-off question out of that. Mhm. Um, you know, for completed homes that completed a year ago, two years ago, and have closed, people living in them.

[00:30:30]Uh, should those people automatically assume that their home price, their value has dropped by 13% because No.

[00:30:36]>> that's what the HST rebate like I know there's the aspect here downtown cuz we don't we don't necessarily have we don't have these suburban homes you know being built here, but for those in the Ajax, the Pickerings, the I mean, that's a good question. Okay, I'm going to take it back. I mean, it really depends on what they paid for their home, right? We don't know because if you took possession a year and a half ago, but you paid 2022 prices, well, you're you're down more than 13%.

[00:31:00]>> but let's take that out of the equation.

[00:31:01]I guess maybe you >> Okay, but even if you paid 2023 or 2024 prices, you know, again, I think it depends on what people paid, but it doesn't necessarily mean your home is worthless because today's new construction houses are selling for potentially a lower price.

[00:31:19]>> Yeah. Cuz there can be new build suburbs right beside 10, 15-year-old homes.

[00:31:25]Yeah.

[00:31:25]>> Uh, and just the new nature of those, they they will probably, uh, you know, warrant a higher price, but I'm just wondering if there are a number of people there who think that now, okay, if I can get something new at X price, can I discount that similarly on, um, on resale? No, listen, I think on resale, you know, if you bought a year ago or a year and a half brand new, your market is your home is just worth what the current resale market is.

[00:31:50]>> Oh, sure, yeah. Right? That's it. It doesn't matter what new construction homes are selling for. They'll probably still sell for a little bit more than resale is the reality. So, if I bought a brand new home a year ago and my home is, let's just say, worth a million bucks today, my instinct is those new construction homes are still probably selling for a little bit more than what I'm worth.

[00:32:11]Right?

[00:32:12]>> Um, so I don't necessarily think it's going to have a huge impact on those.

[00:32:16]>> there were some people who just thinking that might be the case. I know it's not the case, but there might be some who, you know, might try to tuck in, uh, you know, reduced offers because because of that, but Yeah. remains to be seen, I guess. All right. Well, I think we'll wrap up with that unless you have any other final thoughts. No, we're good. All right. Thank you all for another round or monthly episode and sending in all your questions. As always, uh, if you want to share any of your own questions, just shoot me an email at [email protected] and we'll go over them next month.

[00:32:46]>> [music]