Understanding Your Local Housing Market

Buying a home is an important lifestyle and investment decision.

You want to buy at the best price possible. You want your monthly payments to be as affordable as possible. You want your home to increase in value as much as possible.

To make sure all that happens, it’s important to look beyond your individual purchase before you buy. You need to look at larger market conditions. What’s happening around you (house price trends, mortgage rate movements, new home construction) will have an influence on your purchase. The more you know, the more control you have.

How do you develop an understanding of how the housing market is evolving? The easiest answer is to take advantage of the information offered by CMHC’s Market Analysis Centre at any regional CMHC Business Centre.

The Market Analysis Centre is there to give you a clear picture of the current housing market. Local market analysis reports are published on a regular basis. They provide information on recent trends in housing market conditions.

Your local CMHC market analyst can tell you if it’s a buyer’s, seller’s or balanced housing market.

In a buyer’s market, the number of homes available for sale exceeds the demand, so prices will either stabilize or drop. With fewer buyers and more homes, you not only have more options to choose from, you also have greater negotiating leverage. You have more time to look for the right home and you can evaluate the choices without feeling pressure to act too quickly.

Another major influence on your decision to buy is the mortgage interest rate. What rates are available now? Will they drop in the immediate future? Will they rise? If so, by how much?

Trying to answer these questions can be difficult. Once again, CMHC’s Market Analysis Service can help. It can provide you with an analysis of the mortgage market and an outlook for future mortgage rates.

For those who need to see the big picture of Canadian housing, the Market Analysis Centre produces a series of national and local subscription reports to provide you with a comprehensive housing view across the country.

To calculate how much you can afford to spend on a house, go to Step 3: Calculate Your Costs. For information on mortgage rates and financing options, go to Step 5: Arranging Your Mortgage.

If you prefer to access the latest housing information directly from the web, you can order our most popular reports on-line and we’ll e-mail them to you in PDF, Lotus or Excel formats — usually on the same business day.

For any of these products, or for other information on the housing market in your area, please contact your regional CMHC Business Centre.

CMHC’s Market Analysis Service offers timely home buying information

At a glance, you can see how housing prices can fluctuate.

These figures apply in a single geographic market. Similar fluctuations appeared in other Canadian centres at different levels.

Mortgage rates are a critical factor in your decision to purchase. This chart illustrates how rates can change quickly.

See how market information helped Hamid and Yvonne make their decision.