– perhaps taking the policy rate to 4 per cent, the highest since 2008, as more economists are now predicting.A growing number of real estate investors are, which has helped fuel the investing craze in Canada that revved up when home prices soared and COVID-19 restrictions led people to spend more time online. As Rachelle Younglai and Jessica Burgess report, over the first year of the pandemic, investor buying of residential properties doubled in Canada.
By the middle of last year, investors accounted for more than a fifth of the country’s home purchases. But when things go wrong with real estate, they can really go wrong. With rising interest rates and cooling housing markets, promoters may not be able to deliver the profits they promised their investors, which has, in turn, upped the pressure on them to further raise rents, worsening the country’s affordable-housing problem.