What is happening…
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008The mortgage liquidity tightening has made it difficult for borrowers who as little as six months ago could easily have been approved. Particularly those with below average credit scores, and certainly self employed buyers.On the subject of self employed buyers who typically have had challenges proving their true income can still get mortgages in most cases but it requires more creativity and involvement from private lenders.I could tell you that right now the bigger issue is activity levels not whether people are being approved.People are just sitting back, buying activity is slow right now. Likely, because of normal seasonal adjustments to activity and of course October’s bashing of consumer confidence is a contributing factor.However we feel all is not lost, inventory levels continue to drop rapidly in Metro Calgary MLS stats and the number of new listings being added is also dropping nicely every month. Our near term prediction is that it will continue to be slow for the next 90 – 120 days but as buyers gain confidence and return to the market for purchasing in the early spring they will find themselves in a nice balanced inventory situation allowing for a relatively healthy market. Quickly, on the subject of CMHC purchasing Mortgage assets from the banks, your viewers need to be careful not to jump to conclusions that this is a pre-cursor to a US style absolute collapse of the mortgage market. We are far from the fundamental things that caused the meltdown in the US, number one, but more importantly CMHC already insures these mortgages that they will buy and they are not in default right now anyway so they are not buying troubled assets number two.This is simply an easy way to for the government to use CMHC and it’s war chest to bring more liquidity to the market. Many will look at this as I mentioned as “see we are in trouble” and have further hits to consumer confidence, but the reality is this is a good thing for the market and will take some time to see the full benefits.I have sent out an e-mail to my team to ask if they have anyone who would want to be involved in your story.




