All housing, all the time

It's forecasting season in Canada, and the housing industry is front and centre.  Following on from yesterday's rosy forecast for house prices from Royal LePage, today brings several more tasty morsels.

• Here is a much less bullish outlook from another huge realtor, ReMax, forecasting that Toronto-area housing prices will fall sharply in early 2018 as a result of new mortgage stress tests (see yesterday's post), before bouncing back later in the year to end up basically unchanged from current levels.

• Here we have the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) predicting that those same mortgage rules will lead to a more than 5 percent fall in home sales in 2018, with prices nationwide edging lower. 

• Here is a report, originally from Bloomberg, suggesting that borrowers facing problems as a result of the new mortgage rules are increasingly turning to unregulated mortgage lenders, paying fancy prices for the privilege and increasing systemic risk.

• And if that's not scary enough, here is a report on new data from Statistics Canada showing that Canadian household debt has reached yet another record high, at 171.1 percent of disposable income. 

You've got to love the last sentence in that final story, a quote from a gent at the Credit Counselling Society: "Canadians need to gain control of their finances and use a budget/spending plan to effectively manage their expenses".  Good luck with that one, sunshine -- you're going to be a busy boy in 2018. At least, that's my forecast.