Canada's Housing Bubble

May 10, 2010 Steffan Ileman examiner.com

Could HST and rising interest rates burst a mortgage bubble in BC?

CBC and other mass media reported this week that, for the first time in Canada, mortgage fraud had been uncovered in Calgary, and the victim Bank of Montreal is going to court to recover its losses. I’d like to propose a caveat, and my humble opinion that Canada’s news cartel is out to lunch on that one.

I reported in January that mortgage fraud was alive and well in Vancouver, and a gang with tentacles extending to Dubai was preying on Asian immigrant women. Several lawsuits have been filed at the BC Supreme Court against parties that seem to be at large, and this may be the tip of an iceberg.

Victims of mortgage fraud in Vancouver have lost properties or life savings and marriages have fallen apart, and most of them don’t have the resources to hire lawyers and go to court. In the apparent absence of any police action, and the size of the immigrant population,  there’s no reason to expect that this type of fraud will stop any time soon.

The caveat is, that this may be the first time that a financial institution is the victim and not the beneficiary of mortgage fraud. Big Business and Big Media get rolling when the shoe falls on the other foot.

A real estate agent that wishes to remain anonymous has told me that, thanks to unscrupulous mortgage brokers, falsifying documents in mortgage applications has become rampant in Vancouver. The agent says this is how some local and foreign buyers that want to get in on Vancouver’s real estate boom extend their buying power. The same assets, for instance, could be recycled and used by a number of different parties to support  mortgage applications, and it’s especially easy to forge documentation from foreign sources.

With HST and rising interest rates it will be more expensive than ever to own or maintain property in British Columbia, and the question is if low income home owners can trigger a bust in BC’s mortgage bubble.