Calkins hosts roundtable at Chamber to discuss homeownership challenges

Calkins claims people who used to be able to qualify for a mortgage, can now no longer qualify.

“It’s keeping people from selling homes, it’s keeping people from moving up from a smaller home to a larger home, it’s just another wet blanket over our economy,” laments Calkins. “It’s putting it out of reach, particularly for Millennials, those in the 18-35 age brackets, putting purchasing a house basically out of reach for them here in central Alberta.”

Calkins says the goal is to get more people back into building homes, creating growth, more jobs and more people buying their own homes.

“When it comes to the stress test, when it comes to GST rebates, when it comes to Capital Gains exemptions, there’s a number of ideas that were brought to the table today that we could get more money off the sidelines and reinvested in the economy here, get people back to work and revitalize the housing market,” he explains. “The folks from the Central Alberta Real Estate Association basically said today that we’re down 20-25 per cent from where we were in 2015. That’s tens of millions of dollars for sure, hundreds of millions of dollars in economic activity just lost, simply because of the application of the stress test.”

Calkins says the industry needs to change course as soon as possible.

“If we can’t get this turned around,” he continues. “Then we’re going to have less and less people qualifying for mortgages, less and less people owning their own homes, less and less people building equity and that is a problem. Especially for first time home-buyers, for young people that are wanting to get into a house, we have to make that more affordable.”

Brandi Pierik, mortgage broker with Dominion Lending Centres in Red Deer, admits she hears a lot of frustration throughout the industry.

“I’ve watched realtors just hanging on by their fingernails for the last few years,” she exclaims. “I think we’re in some challenging times, I think those challenges bring opportunity. I think we maybe need to stop thinking about the days when we had 40 year amortizations and zero down, it wasn’t good necessarily for any of us but what could we do now?”

Pierik says it’s important to note that some people are actually saving and coming into her office with a down payment.

“We’ve got some concentration of immigrant populations in Red Deer that are saving down payments,” she explains. “They’ve got fantastic credit, they’re ready to buy houses. They would welcome a government that would talk about enhancing programs for them.”

Pierik points-out single women are also entering the local housing market in droves.

“It’s unprecedented that single women are purchasing real estate on their own,” she exclaims. “They’ve got money, they’ve got great credit but whether it be divorce or that they’re choosing to delay family, they’re wanting to buy homes. So what if we had programs for single women to purchase homes? It’s time to start thinking about what we could do, as opposed to what we no longer can do.”

by Sheldon Spackman

Calkins hosts roundtable at Chamber to discuss homeownership challenges

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