89 – Is the Canadian Housing Bubble about to Burst?

Is Canadian real estate due for a crash? On today's show, I speak with Hilliard MacBeth, a portfolio manager and author of When the Bubble Bursts: Surviving the Canadian Real Estate Crash, who thinks the Canadian housing bubble is about to burst.

Hilliard notes that there are four symptoms of a bubble:

1. A period of rapidly rising prices
2. People telling each other stories about why the price increase makes sense
3. People experiencing regret that they didn't get into the market earlier, or the fear of missing out – i.e. if they don't get into the market now, they never will
4. The media starts to talk about the bubble

He mentions that there is a prevailing myth that only Vancouver and Toronto are in a real estate bubble, when in fact the bubble exists across Canada. While incomes have only risen by 15% in the last 15 years and inflation has been under 2% for a long time, house prices have tripled. Considering that houses are paid for with income, the ratio of house-price-to-income has become so stretched that the bubble is no longer sustainable.