It’s the Bank of Mom and Pops! A Bank of Montreal report suggests first-time home buyers are increasingly turning to their parents when getting their first new place.
BMO’s 2015 Home Buying Report found that 42 per cent of first-time buyers told an online survey that they expected their parents or relatives to help pay for their first home.
That’s up 12 per cent from last year’s report.
The bank also said 40 per cent of the first-time buyers said they couldn’t afford a home without financial help from family.
The study found the first-timers were anticipating a downpayment of about $59,413 on average and had a budget of $312,700 for the purchase — slightly less than last year’s average price of $316,100.
The bank also found that 42 per cent of current home-owners surveyed said they were looking for family help with the purchase. Their average budget was $473,000 and their average downpayment was $123,214.
The BMO report is based on online interviews with a random sample of 2,007 people aged 18 years or more between Feb. 24 and March 5.
The polling industry’s professional body, the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error as they are not a random sample and therefore are not necessarily representative of the whole population.
Prices in Canada have been rising since 2009 with the Toronto and Vancouver, market values surging as much as 56 per cent in six years. Now as the European Central Bank’s bond buying helps drive down rates to near-record lows in Canada, the housing market is poised to ascend even higher.
Re/Max, the country’s largest residential real estate agency, raised its forecast for home price growth to 3 per cent from 2.5 per cent last week because transactions and values were so high in the first three months of this year. In March, housing sales rallied 4.1 per cent, the most in 10 months.
Toronto home sales increased 11 per cent to more than 8,000 transactions in March over the prior year, according to the Canadian Real Estate Association. Prices in the country’s most populous city jumped 10 per cent to about $601,500.
In Vancouver, Canada’s most expensive home market, sales soared 53 per cent and the average cost to buy a home rose 11 per cent to $870,000.
Let’s hope the Bank of Mom and Pop’s continues to dole out the cash with these prices…although there’s is always Grandma.
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SOURCE: BMO
