VanRant at vancouvercondo.info 11 Aug 2010 11:22 am – “I was told by someone working inside the real estate division of one of our major banks that there is a major real estate crash coming to Canada and that they are trying to prepare for it.”
[Reminiscent of this anecdote, 21 Jul 2010. ]
and i was told the world would end Dec 21, 2012.
Interesting… but did your source “work inside the real estate division of one of our major banks”… ?
i have never heard of a ‘real estate division’ in major banks? lol
… regardless of names, you do get the general idea, don’t you?
The Mortgage/HELOC/RE_ATM departments; the guys who follow the debt to household income ratios; the people who “have leveraged up the Canadian citizenry to unsustainable levels”; the insiders who know how bad this is going to be because they know how leveraged the population’s net-worth is to the RE market.
My account manager @ RBC recently (5 months ago) changed from what I believe to be a more general accounts area to one which deals largely with mortgages. In order to make this transfer, he called to let me know that he’s transferring my account to another representative. So, yes, there are specific representatives that deal primarily with mortgages and housing related requests and it cannot overlap with the general products (checking, savings, GIC, etc). I had actually gotten a pre-approval from him, so he knew that I was looking, and on the cusp at one point, but he still had to give up my account.
As it turns out, the new representative fed me the line that “in the long term housing never goes down so you should think about getting a mortgage today.” I had my account transferred to another representative the next day. I’m not sure if I believe that a crash is coming to Canada yet (I’m still of the school that it’s going to be a long, drawn-out, 10-20 year slow decline to bottom) but if there is one, my bank did not exercise caution to avoid it.
how bad this is going to be? crystall ball is one dollar a piece at dollar store.
Yes, but that doesn’t mean one should refrain from attempting to determine likely future events in order to position and protect oneself.
I’d ping this one over to a certain local blogger who may be actually involved in the banking industry for verification. I’ll ask around too. Still, it’s nice to SPECULATE on what the banks are doing, isn’t it? We’re all… never mind.