The phrase “housing bubble” is dangerously close to platitudinal territory. Something of a slogan used to characterize the cost of buying property in metro Toronto and Vancouver — often with the contiguous phrase “red hot” — it’s neither useful nor factual. There is no economic tsunami poised to replace over-leveraged homeowner optimism with anguish and destitution. Experts say we don’t even know if this is a bubble at all.

“People are really only able to identify that it was a bubble after the fact if there’s been some sort of a strong correction,” says Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation chief economist Bob Dugan.

Although Toronto’s average home prices in May went up 14.9 per cent over 12 months, the rise is conservative when compared with 33 per cent in March from the previous year. According to the Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB), new listings in May increased by 48.9 per cent and sales dropped 20.3 per cent. So based on a month’s data — which responsible analysts are not comfortable using as the basis for broader claims — it seems as though the market is calming gradually, not at whiplash speed.

“Data from month to month can be volatile,” Dugan says. “We’ve certainly seen a cooling in April, but when we forecasted for the Greater Toronto Area, we did expect activity to cool. In the first quarter of 2017, existing home sales hit a record level and we have been forecasting those sales to decline through the rest of the year.”

That the market is more or less behaving as the CMHC predicted hasn’t given pause to the scaremongering of columnists. In Canada’s Housing Assessment Report (HMA) for the second quarter of 2017, overvaluation in the country’s housing overall has been downgraded to moderate from a previously strong assessment.

“House price growth at the national level has weakened to around 4 per cent year-over-year, while personal disposable income has grown at a steady pace and growth in young adult population has strengthened at the end of 2016,” the HMA finds.

However, there are still significant areas of concern, according to the HMA report, and not just in megalopolises. The report determines the health of a particular market by examining four factors: (1) overheating, where demand for existing homes leaps ahead of the supply of existing homes for sale; (2) continuous price acceleration, (3) overvaluation of house prices in comparison to what the market can support, (4) overbuilding, which is when the inventory of newly built housing units rises along with the number of available rental units. Of the 15 metropolitan areas analyzed, Toronto, Vancouver, Victoria, Saskatoon and Hamilton showed strong evidence of problematic housing conditions.

“It’s not just Toronto and Vancouver, we’ve also noticed some spreading to neighbouring communities,” Dugan says. “Hamilton is showing price acceleration and overvaluation and when you look at the B.C. market around Vancouver, we’re seeing that in Victoria as well.”

But the cavalcade of alarmist columns flowed uninterrupted in Financial Post, CBCNews and Huff Post (which will soon share a parent company with Yahoo) this year, calling for a repeat of the 1989 housing market crash, using marquee phrases such as “Big banks raise alarms,” “CEOs are concerned,” and “What if Canada’s real estate bubble bursts?”

Well, a “crash” is not likely to happen because the market today is notably different from that of the late 1980s. In 1985, the posted interest rate for a five-year fixed mortgage (the most popular in Canada) was 13.25 per cent. Today, it’s between 2.2 and 2.7 per cent, and won’t flicker too far off that mark.

“I think the cost of borrowing money will remain fairly low but I do expect it to go up,” Dugan says. “Interest rates are going to rise at the end of 2017, beginning of 2018, but it’ll be a gradual rise I don’t think it’s going to happen very quickly. That’s our forecast.”

What analysts really mean when they predict a crash is that the market’s problematic conditions make Canadians more vulnerable to external economic shocks, for example a shake-up in the U.S. economy.

Household debt in Canada is fairly high when you compare debt levels to income. In isolation, this is no cause for terror, but were something unexpected to happen, the market would correct sharply.

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