The World This Hour - The World This Hour for 2025/03/23 at 07:00 EDT

Episode Date: March 23, 2025

The World This Hour for 2025/03/23 at 07:00 EDT

In Scarborough, there's this fire behind our eyes. A passion in our bellies. It's in the hearts of our neighbors. The eyes of our nurses. And the hands of our doctors. It's what makes Scarborough, Scarborough. In our hospitals, we do more than anyone thought possible. We've less than anyone could imagine.

But it's time to imagine what we can do with more. Join Scarborough Health Network and together, we can turn grit into greatness. Donate at lovescarborough.ca. And that's why we've seen those areas in Canada increase rents because the demand has increased. I always ask the tenant why they're leaving. The landlord would never fix anything.

He didn't really take good care of the unit. What the tenant was telling us is beware. You were thinking about buying this year, and now you're concerned about whether or not you might have a job in the next six months. Everyone is scared. No one is certain and no one knows what's coming next. With so much uncertainty around tariffs and counter tariffs, Canadians housing market is officially slowing down. Home sales are declining, construction costs are rising, and some rents are falling. A report by Rentals.ca suggests that national asking prices by landlords have dropped, on average, for five months in a row. And according to the Canadian Real Estate Association, national home sales fell by about 10% in February.

So those are the statistics. But what do you do with that information if you're actually in the housing market? Whether you're renting, buying, leasing or selling, we're taking your questions about the housing market in Canada. Maybe you want to know about your rights as a renter. Maybe you want to know how to negotiate with landlords and sellers to get the best deal. How do you leverage this slowing market in your favour? So we have two guests joining us to help answer your questions. Tom Story is a Toronto realtor and sales representative with Royal LePage and Sydney Bloom is a community

legal worker at Dalhousie Legal Aid where she wrote the clinic's Tenants Rights Guide. You can call us with your questions about navigating the housing market, the number 1-888-416-8333. That's 1-888-416-8333. Good afternoon, Tom and Sydney. Good afternoon. How are you? I'm doing well. Tom, I'll start with you. We've been hearing a lot about the rental market and how things are shifting. These are national numbers, so they're not the same across the board. How differently is this playing out from region to region? It's a lot different and what you've really seen from the rental.ca report is that the markets that we would always be considering the more expensive markets are the ones that

are seeing the biggest decreases in rent. And then the markets that were maybe the more affordable markets, they're actually the ones where we're seeing the increases in rent. So I think a lot of it comes down to potentially people just getting fed up with rental prices in markets like Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, even Ottawa, and moving to markets like Alberta, going to Edmonton, going to Calgary.

So it really depends on kind of what area you're looking at, but for the first time in a long time, for most of the major expensive markets across this country, rental prices are going down and that should be news that renters should be pretty excited about. But Sydney, I am curious, are all of the rental markets in those particular regions where we're seeing a drop, are they all going down or is it a certain high end or low end that's going down? Well, so Tom kind of hit on this. So what we're seeing on the ground, especially in places like Halifax, where it's where people are moving in search of more affordable rentals, we're really seeing that decrease in rents at the higher end of the market.

So these sort of luxury rentals. And we're seeing those prices go down where again, Tom was saying, you know, the affordable housing is still going up and especially in these markets where people are moving from bigger cities, maybe in search of more affordable rents, there may be a little bit more money in their pockets. Certainly, we're seeing that increase in sort of the median rent price. I assume part of that is that those lower end housing options are more competitive. Yes, absolutely. We've heard of hundreds of people showing up to apartment viewings out here in Nova Scotia, line up to down the street.

Tom, what if you are buying a home? We know the housing market seems to be affected by this trade war already. Does a slower market mean prices will go down or are we just seeing fewer sales? Yeah, I mean a slower market typically just means that there's less sales that happened. If you really want to get into the specifics of the market, you look at active listings and the percentage of listings that are selling every single month and that's a term that we would call months of inventory that can pretty much break down for any buyer in any market. What percentage of homes are actually selling and does that put you in a buyer's market,

a seller's market or a balanced out market? These numbers are great to figure out, try to figure out what's going on, but it's really breaking them down and figuring out how long have we actually