Mike Sasges
Sun
For 60 years, mortgage-loan insurance from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation has been helping Canadians, especially younger Canadians, with home-affordability challenges.
There’s not too much the national housing agency doesn’t know, or hasn’t investigated, about the rights and wrongs of home ownership, in other words.
And, thanks to the Internet, what it knows is readily available when you’re ready to know it.
One of its publications, Home Buying Step By Step, actually reduces the life-changing first-purchase to a “couldn’t be easier” process of 10 steps. (It’s not, of course.) The first step is the biggest: deciding if home ownership is right for you. (It isn’t for everyone.)
Another CMHC publication, Condominium Buyers’ Guide, is especially germane to metropolitan Vancouver home-ownership.
If buying a new-build apartment or townhouse, before or after construction-completion, a provincial government website is an indispensible supplement to the national guide.
The B.C. Financial Institutions Commission administers 10 statutes, four of them governing real estate and strata-property transactions and relationships, before and after a sale. (“Condominium living . . . can be a relatively carefree housing option,” CMHC says. Depends on who all is involved, the provincial website suggests.)
CMHC also maintains an “Affordable Housing Centre” on its website. (That’s where I found Pro-Home: a progressive, planned approach to affordable home ownership and its immigrant-experience observations.) Intended for “professionals,” read the right way it has much that is personally useful, inspiring even.
Prof. Robert Shiller’s paper, “Understanding Recent Trends in House Prices and Home Ownership,” has been published by Yale University‘s Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at Yale University.
The Greater Foot website is maintained by Garth Turner, sometime journalist and author and financial adviser and federal MP and cabinet minister. Think of it as a cyberspace equivalent of those desert and mountain refuges of our collective past where New Believers have gathered to scorn — “Greater Fool” — and scold Old Believers at eschatological, “end of an age,” moments, like the passing of real estate as religion.
You will find:
Garth Turner, and his correspondents, at greaterfool.ca; Shiller’s “Recent Trends” paper through a search at cowles.econ.yale.edu; The provincial financial institutions commission website at fic.gov.bc.ca;
The CMHC website at cmhc-schl.gc.ca.
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