Sean MacKay

Canada’s housing market has more firepower than some economists had imagined heading into 2021 and its performance through the first half of the year has Canada’s biggest bank reassessing its market outlook.

Housing markets on both sides of the border have continued to sizzle through 2021, but Canadian real estate is indisputably hotter than the US market right now.

New homebuyers kicked off 2021 with a bang, scooping up 6,208 new properties across the Vancouver region in the first quarter of the year.

Sales activity is cooling down from the peaks reached earlier in the year, but Toronto home prices are continuing to soar as demand remains well above current supply levels.

While May’s total was down on a monthly basis, transactions soared 187 percent over the same month last year, when the pandemic continued to severely hinder housing market activity.

Toronto was among the fastest growing metropolitan areas in Canada and the US in 2020, adding 92,000 people last year even as immigration declined and some residents moved away to escape high housing costs.

Rent prices in major markets across the country have slowly reversed course over the last couple of months after a long stretch of significant declines. But an even stronger resurgence is on the horizon.

As we inch closer to the middle of 2021, there’s no question that it’s already been a barnburner of a year for BC’s housing market.

A new report says this deteriorating affordability trend may have worsened during the pandemic as home prices surged, but it’s only part of a decade-long trend which has affected the country’s most expensive markets — Toronto and Vancouver — as well as smaller cities.

Single-family and multi-family home building boomed in two distinct periods in the early and late 1970s with a recession, according to Statistics Canada data. Home construction soared again in the late 1980s before the recession of 1990-1991 spoiled the party.