The Honourable Jim Flaherty, Minister of Finance, today announced a number of measured steps to support the long-term stability of Canada's housing market and continue to encourage home ownership for Canadians.
"Canada's housing market is healthy, stable and supported by our country's solid economic fundamentals," said Minister Flaherty. "However, a key lesson of the global financial crisis is that early policy action can help prevent negative trends from developing."
The Government will therefore adjust the rules for government-backed insured mortgages as follows:
"There's no clear evidence of a housing bubble, but we're taking proactive, prudent and cautious steps today to help prevent one. Our Government is acting to help prevent Canadian households from getting overextended, and acting to help prevent some lenders from facilitating it," said Minister Flaherty. "If some lenders aren't willing to act themselves, we will act. These measures demonstrate the Government is committed to taking action when necessary to support the long-term stability of a sector that is so vital to our economy and the financial well-being of Canadian families."
These adjustments to the mortgage insurance guarantee framework are intended to come into force on April 19, 2010.
Well it's Friday, and this week I have personally come across two online real estate scams, both very different and via Craigslist. I'm fairly savvy when it comes to these online scams, (being an avid online shopper) and I can normally spot them a mile away. One however, caused me to waste some time, since it was particularly sly, so I thought I'd share...
1) The Rental Scam- I have an apartment advertised on Craigslist for $1550/month + utilities, and a customer called me to schedule a viewing. While speaking with them they said, "why is that so high? I see one in the same building for $700/month". Surprised, I had him forward me the info and I contacted the "owner" to find out they were missionaries in Africa and would give me the keys in exchange for wiring them a deposit through Western Union, and they would love to rent me the place (I'm sure they would!) Anyhow, as far as I know, this scam has been running awhile, but good to watch out for regardless.
2) The Sophisticated Rental/Sale Scam- This is the one I didn't catch right at first! A fairly well written person contacted me from yet again, our rental on Craigslist. He said that he, his wife and daughter would be relocating here and had some questions. He asked about a list of 8 questions such as; how much are the utilities? Where are the nearest elementary schools? Do we have a floor plan? All fairly standard. After answering all of these, he provided me with a phone number, references in Canada because he was currently in England (red flag #1) and that he wanted to take it without seeing it (Red flag#2) and he had a few more questions, blah blah blah. I took a look at the e-mail address and immediately recognized it from a previous scam a few months earlier I had kept. Mystery solved, but with a lot of time wasted :(
I couldn't help but wonder, what was the point of this one? So I took a quick look online and found many similar scam reportings, where they make you feel comfortable and eventually ask for a bank account to wire the money to, and some real estate offices (including ours) does accept wire transfers...yikes!
3)Phishing Scams (aka - tricking you into logging into secured accounts)- These emails pretend to be from reputable institutions, such as large banks, online transaction companies such as PayPal or Ebay, or IT administrators of companies or universities. They notify the recipient of an "urgent" situation that requires them to "verify" their secure information, and lead the recipient to a fake website (which usually looks quite real) that then collects the recipient's log-in, financial, or other sensitive information. The fake website can be very similar to the true website, and victims are fooled into entering their log-in information or credit card details, letting them fall right into the hands of crafty scammers.
Most websites and online services will never ask a customer to send their log-in information. To protect against these scams, if a company ever asks YOU for your security code on-line, call them first (not from a number on the website) but from a legitimate phone number on your bank statements or paper records.
4) The You've Won the Lottery Scam - An email tells the recipient that they are the lucky winner of the lottery (at times, it is a lottery from a foreign country), and they can receive this fortune once they pay the tax or processing fees.
In these scams, the recipient can pay all the fees he wants, but he will never receive that $250,000 prize. Follow Mom's advice, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
5) Donations for Disaster Relief- It seems some scammers are not above anything and are using others misfortunes for their own benefit. Donation scams are the last type of email scam to watch out for. These are scams that use a recipient's goodwill and benevolence against them by asking for donations for some heart wrenching disaster. Rather than going to the purported cause, however, the money goes into the pocket of the scammer. If you receive a solicitation to donate and you would like to, contact a registered charity yourself, don't donate through e-mail.
To report online scams, please go go to http://www.ic3.gov/complaint and fill out a complaint form.
5 Ways to Spot Red Flags
1. You are contacted via email regarding a property.You may have posted on Craigslist, for instance, so email is hardly unexpected. Be on the lookout for poor grammar or comments that make no sense.
2. There is a sense of urgency. If you feel pressured to act quickly because of some immediate need, be especially cautious. Scam artists count on decisions made in haste.
3. The request comes from outside the country. This may turn out to be a legitimate inquiry but once you know it originated from somewhere overseas proceed with caution.
4. Third parties become involved. If the person wanting to rent your property needs to use a friend or someone else as an intermediary in order to pay, you should be at your own highest alert level. This is a common Nigerian Scam ploy.
5. You will be overpaid. This is one of the tricks these scam artists use to get money out of you. Normally, you would be the one receiving cash in a transaction. In this case, however, the check or money order is made out for more than you requested. Oops. Now they'll want you to wire the extra amount back to them. Once you do, they back out of the entire arrangement and days later you will find out that the check or money order was a forgery and you're stuck with the loss.
We all like a little fun with numbers, reminds me of the good old Sesame Street Days, so have a read, I know at least 3 will surprise you!
Ottawa Citizen Index by: Bruce Deachman
15,500: How many police, military personnel and private security guards will be providing security at the Vancouver Olympics.
10,000: The estimated number of media representatives who will be at the Vancouver Olympics.
1,014: The number of medals that have been made for the Vancouver Olympics.
$80,500: How much a seven-year-old Brit Charlie Simpson raised in a single day for Haiti relief, by bicycling eight kilometers around his local London park.
$800: How much he had initially hoped to raise.
200,000: The estimated number of people who died in the Jan. 12 earthquake.
11: The number of days a 25-year-old Haitian spent drinking Coca Cola in the rubble of a Port-au-Prince grocery store before being rescued.
12: The number of days another man survived, on just small amounts of water, in the rubble of a building on Port-au-Prince Rue de Miracles.
$325,000: How much the 2010 Bell Sens Soiree raised Monday night for four area charities.
28 minutes, 9 seconds: How long it takes during a regular season game for the club's payroll to reach that amount.
6: The percentage of Canadians who say they trust social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter.
79: The percentage of Canadians who say they don't.
54: The percentage of Canadian men who have been tempted to hook up with the romantic partner of a friend.
43: The percentage of North American men who have similarly been tempted.
5: The percentage of Canadian women who have considered the same.
20: The percentage of North American women tempted by friends' partners.
43: The percentage of Torontonians who are overweight or obese, the lowest rate of 36 Ontario regions.
48: The percentage of Ottawans who are overweight or obese, the third-lowest rate.
60.8: The percentage of residents of Ontario's Eastern counties who are overweight or obese, the eighth-highest rate in the province.
17.6: The percentage of Ottawans who smoke, the fourth-lowest rate in the province.
18.2: The percentage of Torontonians who smoke, the fifth-lowest rate in Ontario.
27.5: The percentage of residents of Eastern Ontario counties who smoke, the fifth-highest rate in the province.
41: The number of millimetres of rain that fell on Ottawa on Monday.
33.6: The previous single-day record, in millimetres, for January, set in 1995.
650,760: The number of unemployed Canadians in October 2008 who were not receiving EI benefits.
777,400: The number in October 2009.
163: Ottawa-Gatineau's rank, in a 272-city study of the most affordable places to live in the world.
112: it's rank a year ago.
800: The number of employees Ohio-based Convergys is laying off from its Heron Road call centre.
7,400: The number of jobs Ottawa has lost in the past three months.
$130 million: The estimated value of Picasso's painting The Actor, which a clumsy art-lover recently ripped when she lost her balance.
188: How many games the Ottawa Senators would have to play before their combined salaries covered that amount.
In December, a report suggested that although the recession has officially ended, economic momentum in Canada's biggest cities is at its lowest level since 1991. Now a new study by the Conference Board of Canada says that of 50 cities studied, only six get an "A" grade when it comes to attracting newcomers.
The study, funded by 15 municipal and regional organizations across Canada, looks at features that make Canadian cities attractive to skilled workers and mobile populations. It uses 41 indicators, grouped into seven categories: society, health, economy, environment, education, innovation and housing.
"Cities that fail to attract new people will struggle to stay prosperous and vibrant," says Mario Lefebvre, director for municipal studies at the Conference Board. "These six cities come out on top across all rankings, so they appear to have an overall winning combination that is attractive to migrants. Although it would be hard to imagine a more diverse group of cities, each has particular strengths that make them magnets to newcomers, both from within Canada and abroad."
The "A"-list cities: Calgary, Waterloo, Ont., Ottawa, Vancouver, St. John's and Richmond Hill, Ont., a Toronto suburb.
The City of Toronto earned a "B" rating, as did Edmonton, Victoria, Halifax, Regina, Quebec City, Levis, Que. and the Ontario cities of Markham, Vaughan, Kingston, Oakville, Guelph, London and Burlington.
Winnipeg, Montreal and Hamilton, Ont. were given "C" grades, as were four Vancouver suburbs: Richmond, Burnaby, Coquitlam and Surrey. Also earning a "C" were B.C. cities Abbotsford and Kelowna; Ontario cities Kitchener, Barrie, Brampton, Sudbury, Thunder Bay, Peterborough and St. Catharines; Quebec's Sherbrooke and Gatineau; Moncton, N.B. and Saskatoon.
Those at the bottom of the list, with "D" rankings, were Oshawa, Brantford, Windsor and Cambridge in Ontario; Longueuil, Saguenay, Trois-Rivieres and Laval in Quebec, and Saint John, N.B.
Calgary earned top marks for its strong economic performance during the last decade, and for ranking first in innovation and second in housing. Waterloo is well-known for excellence in education (ranked No. 1) and did well for innovation, economy and housing. Ottawa, home of the federal government, did well in innovation and education and had good marks in all categories except health.
Fast-growing Richmond Hill has a well-educated workforce and scored high in education and innovation. Vancouver's temperate climate and young, diverse, multi-cultural population served it well in the survey, while St. John's productivity level and strength in health and environment categories pushed it to the top.
The Toronto area attracted 35 per cent of Canada's immigrants between 2001 and 2006, but that still wasn't enough to get the city and most of its suburbs into the top rankings. It scored poor results in the environment (poor air quality) and health (too few doctors for such a large population) rankings. However, Toronto did get top marks in the society section because it employs many people in cultural occupations, and because of the high number of foreign-born people living there. Montreal was the only other city to get an "A" in the society category.
In housing, small and mid-sized cities scored the best results because of affordability. The exception was in B.C., where real estate is expensive and five cities got "D" rankings. The Quebec City suburb of Levis notched the top score in housing.
Although Calgary took top spot in the economy rankings in the Conference Board study, a December report by CIBC World Markets (phttp://research.cibcwm.com/res/Eco/ArEcoMEA.html) paints a different picture. The Metro Monitor uses nine economic variables to develop an index of economic activity that measures the change in each city's level of activity. Overall, economic activity in Canada's cities is at its lowest level since 1991, says the report.
The latest Monitor has Halifax in first place.
"Halifax was able to move its way into the first spot in our third-quarter ranking - a notable improvement from its fifth spot six months ago," says Benjamin Tal, senior economist at CIBC World Markets, who said the ranking was achieved "despite the fact that the city did not lead the nation in any of our macro categories, reflecting its relatively diversified sources of economic growth and reduced vulnerability to economic shocks."
Regina and Saskatoon ranked second and third, based on their rapidly growing populations and expanding job markets. But Tal says, "Calgary and Edmonton, which until recently were the stars of our index, are losing ground and currently hardly above water in terms of overall economic momentum."
Toronto ranks seventh on the list, due to poor employment performance, increased bankruptcies and a drop in new housing starts. Vancouver is ranked 12th - "its worst performance in years" - despite the economic activity generated by the upcoming Olympic Winter Games.
"More than two-thirds of Canadian GDP is generated by Canada's major cities," says Tal. "So the tale of those cities is the tale of the economy."
Written by Jim Adair
Vancouver has become one of the most unaffordable housing markets in the world, with Toronto and Montreal not far behind, according to a survey released on Monday.
Ottawa, like most other Canadian cities in the survey, remained in the "moderately unaffordable" category.
Vancouver not only has the least affordable housing of 28 markets measured in Canada, but of 272 metropolitan markets ranked in Ireland, Britain, New Zealand, Australia, United States and Canada.
As Canada's resale housing prices rose in 2009, affordability fell, sending the national average reading to 3.7 from 3.5 the year before. That would place Canada's overall housing market in the "moderately unaffordable" category, which is from 3.1 to 4.
The numbers are calculated by dividing the median (or middle) residential house sale price from the third quarter by median annual gross household income. In Vancouver, the median home price of $540,900 was divided by median household income of $58,200 to create a multiple of 9.3. Any reading over 5.1 is considered to be "severly unaffordable."
Out of the 272 cities globally, Ottawa ranked 163rd in affordability. In 2009, Ottawa was ranked 112th. Ottawa still remains one of the more affordable capitals!
The Demographia study was released in Canada by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
Financial Post, with files from Robert Bostelaar, Ottawa Citizen.
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