The housing market in Canada is so bad that people are giving up on owning

Even though housing prices in Canada have fallen significantly over the last year, a majority of Canadians have still given up on their dreams of owning a home according to new research from one of the country’s leading market research firms. 

According to a new Ipsos poll conducted on behalf of Global News, researchers found that 63% of Canadians who didn’t already own their own house had given up on the idea of home ownership because it was now out of reach.

The Ipsos researchers tried to explain the phenomena by attributing it to the most difficult economic times Canadians have faced in decades, adding that Canadian renters are pessimistic and “rethinking how they might achieve traditional milestones.”

“Over the next year, most Canadians are staying put in their current housing situation, with few saying they will be entering into the housing market or looking to move,” the Ipsos researchers wrote in a post on the polling organization’s website. 

In 2022, Ipsos ran a similar poll which found that six in ten Canadians who didn’t already own a home one year ago also felt as if ownership was out of reach, a fact that the researchers commented on in their most recent analysis. 

“When asked about their agreement with a series of statements about the current housing market in the country, attitudes are consistent with last year, suggesting that housing prices, interest rates, and government policies have yet to have any significant impact on how Canadians feel about the real estate market,” the researchers noted. 

Much has been done by Justin Trudeau’s government in the last twelve months to help alleviate the problems facing Canadians and their housing crises, though as the Ipsos researchers noted, none of it has seemed to help. 

According to Global News, Trudeau’s 2022 federal budget contained a number of policies aimed at improving housing affordability, some of which included the first Tax-Free Home Savings Account and a Home Buyer’s Bill of Rights.

Unfortunately, the Tax-Free Home Savings Account was set to launch on April 1st but Globe and Mail’s Salmaan Farooqui noted in a recent article that most Canadian banks still had no proper timeline for when the accounts would be available. 

“Some banks—including Bank of Montreal, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and Toronto-Dominion Bank—only said the account will be open sometime this year, while Royal Bank of Canada said it expected to release the product in the spring,” Salmaan wrote. 

Trudeau’s Home Buyer’s Bill of Rights also seems to have run into problems. The federal government still hasn’t rolled out the plan according to Global News and at present has given no guidance on a possible timeline. 

The Home Buyer’s Bill of Rights is important for Canadians because of the measures it was planning to take in order to curb the country’s out-of-control real estate market, measures that were said to include the end of blind bidding according to Global News. 

Trudeau’s bungling of the housing situation isn’t lost on Canadians. Only 27% of those polled said they thought the federal government was doing enough to address the housing affordability crisis in Canada, not that the programs would have helped. 

Even if the federal government's plans were in place it still wouldn’t incentivize Canadians to buy, 71% of respondents to Ipsos’ poll said high-interest rates were keeping them from entering the housing market.

“There’s a feeling out there that despite the fact that homeownership continues to be a good investment and people believe that you’re better off financially if you own a home, something is holding them back,” Ipsos Vice President Sean Simpson told Global News.

That something is Canada’s extremely high-interest rates and a feeling that investing in a home now wouldn’t make financial sense for most Canadians, which begs the question: Will things ever get better for those searching for a home in Canada?