Canada’s Real Estate Bubble: First-Time Buyers Need To Be Among Top Earners

Earning a healthy, middle-class income? Good for you, but odds are slanted against you when it comes to ever owning a home in Canada these days. Statistics Canada’s Canadian Housing Statistics Program (CHSP) looked at first-time buyer incomes. The data shows that first-time buyers had much higher incomes than the median household. The problems extend beyond pricey regions like B.C., into more “affordable” provinces like Nova Scotia. First-Time Homebuyers Earn Up To 36% More Than Typical Families The median income of first-time homebuyers vs all households in 2023. Source: StatCan; Better Dwelling. Most of Canada can’t afford a starter home, according to the agency’s data. The agency looked at 5 regions, 4 provinces and 1 territory, between 2021 and 2023. They found that first-time buyers earned between 13% and 36% more than local median incomes. That’s a substantial gap, and you can probably guess where the worst offender is located. The biggest gap is in B.C.. where households buying their first home had a median annual income of $145,000 in 2023. That works out to 35.9% (+$38.3k) more than the median income of all households. It was followed by Nova Scotia, where first-time buyer...