The Bank of Mom and Dad has become such an integral part of the Canadian housing market that almost half of today’s first-time and move-up buyers actually expect to be backstopped on the biggest purchase of their lives by their real-estate rich parents , according to a new BMO survey.

Some 42 per cent of first-time and move-up buyers expect their parents or relatives to help pay for their home, according to the annual survey, released Thursday. That’s up about 12 percentage points from last year’s Home Buying Report.

Those expectations range from an average of $37,500 for first-time buyers to a stunning $94,780 from so-called “upsizers” graduating to a bigger place, according to an online survey of more than 2,000 Canadians over the age of 18 done for BMO between February 24 and March 5.

Some 40 per cent of first-time buyers and 50 per cent of upsizers who’ve come to expect this help say they couldn’t afford to buy a house otherwise, according to the survey.

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Perhaps more worrisome, significantly more first-time buyers – about 48 per cent – say they are willing to do bidding war battle to get the home of their dreams, up from 35 per cent last year.

That number drops substantively – to 36 per cent – for move-up buyers.

Last spring, Canada’s federal housing agency, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation warned that part of the reason the country’s housing market is “modestly” overvalued is at least in part because of “gifting” from baby boomer parents who are using their own real estate gains from the almost two-decade long housing boom to help finance homes their children otherwise couldn’t afford.

CMHC has been trying to get a sense of the magnitude of the wealth being handed down to echo boomer children by their baby boomer parents to try to determine if, and by how much, that wealth transfer is actually skewing house prices and purchases.

That backstopping by Mom and Dad is widely seen as part of the reason bidding wars have become so frantic in the GTA market, where even first-time buyers are bidding tens of thousands – sometimes hundreds of thousands – over asking price on properties that even bank appraisers say aren’t worth the price.