Friday, 20 June 2014

Percentages, down payments, home buying and insurance

Is CMHC still assisting all Canadian home buyers? 

By Mark Schadenberg
My career is to sell houses – a full-time Realtor for more than 15 years.
The Canadian Mortgage & Housing Corporation has again managed to figure out how to assist home buyers, but assist the banks more at the same time.
CMHC was created as an insurance fall-back, so that Canadians with only 5 per cent as a down payment can still purchase a home, that's the good news. However, now their strict rules are becoming more strict as the government mandated body seemingly wants to dictate how expensive a home you can buy. In other words, they appear ready to help the first-time buyer into a $250,000 entry-level house, but are ready to throw out a caution flag to a family hoping to buy in the upper-middle class range, even if that family has an impeccable credit record and impressive employment earnings numbers.
Let's understand this first – Canadian banks do not lose money on anyone's mortgage ever, and actually make a boatload of money if the home buyer defaults after more than 2 years of ownership. It's simple math actually as the lending institution receives any shortfall from (from CMHC) the sale of the home through a 'power of sale' transaction process.
If anyone buying a home qualifies for the monthly mortgage payment amount based on their supplied down payment, employment level and beacon credit score, but have less than 20 percent down, a percentage of insurance costs are added to the mortgage – i.e. CMHC fee
Using equal money amounts therefore, CMHC would rather insure you on a $250,000 mortgage with perhaps $45,000 down payment (15 % down), then a $300,000 mortgage with the same down payment. Less risk for the insurance company and you own more instant equity as a percentage. It would almost seem as though they only want to insure people that don't need insurance, so they can pocket the profit.
All this seems odd because they just recently increased the insurance percentage to 3.15% from 2.75% on a client with only 5% down, which means the premium for a $200,000 mortgage leaped earlier this year from $5,500 to $6,300.
I'm in the wrong line of work. CMHC and Realtors are supposed to promote home ownership in Canada, but CMHC seems to be looking only for the absolute 'safe bet'. My opinion.

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Mark Schadenberg, Sales Representative
Senior Real Estate Specialist (SRES designation)
Royal LePage Triland Realty
757 Dundas St, Woodstock
www.wesellwoodstock.com
(519) 537-1553, cell or text
Email: mschadenberg@rogers.com
Twitter: markroyallepage
Facebook: Mark Schadenberg, Royal LePage Triland
Discussion . . . Direction . . . Determination . . . Destination


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