As open houses and presentation centers reopen with COVID-19 safety measures, developers wonder how the pandemic lockdown might affect the features that homebuyers look for and how the economic fallout will hit the real estate market. Benchmark housing prices released by the real estate industry held firm, and even nudged slightly higher, in May compared to a year earlier. But at least one major bank has joined Canada Mortgage Housing Corporation in predicting there will be price drops to come. “Pre-virus, a good chunk of the market buying condos were mom-and-pop investors.” Now, with the collapse of the short-term rental market and stalled immigration, there…

  But the pandemic and the subsequent ban on short-term rentals has led to such a sharp decline in the number of Airbnb bookings in major urban centres that those furnished units have migrated to the long-term rental market, according to data obtained by the Post from various condo rental sites and a real estate analytics company. “The 2020 numbers are for the first 12 days of June. The 2019 numbers are for the entire month of June 2019. So, as you can see, there has been an explosion of listings (on the long-term rental market) in the first 12 days this year…

The economic uncertainty surrounding COVID-19 has contributed to contradictory estimates of future housing prices and sales. Leading the bears is the Canada Mortgage Housing Corporation (CMHC), projecting average housing prices to fall by nine to 18 per cent. Others, including economists at the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA), are not convinced prices will fall as steeply as the CMHC projects. Many homebuyers and sellers have been left perplexed by these conflicting forecasts — much can go wrong if they rely on the wrong estimates in their buy and sell decisions. Will real estate prices plunge? That may depend on the sellers Regardless of…

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