Originally posted on Canadian Real Estate Magazine by Corben Grant on 10 May 2022
There are two things that have seemingly been constant fixtures in Canadian real estate for at least the last decade: the rising cost of homes, and the supposed Canadian housing bubble. It seems every month a new statistic release indicates rising prices, and right along with it, someone starts to call for the beginning of the end. Ok, this time it’s really gonna happen!

Fortunately or unfortunately, that day has yet to come. This doesn’t mean that the bubble isn’t real or that we shouldn’t be concerned, but it at least has proven that bubbles are incredibly hard to accurately predict until it is too late. After all, that is the very nature of speculative bubbles.

So, the years go on and prices go up and the apocalyptic bubble watchers proclaim their warnings and nothing changes. Investors continue to gamble and bet against the bubble, while Canadians who have been priced out of homeownership secretly (or not so secretly) hope this is the year.

The thing is, there is a pretty good case to be made that in 2022, things may actually be different. Naturally, the last few years were unprecedented on a global scale, but the conditions in the real estate market also were unlike anyone had ever seen. If there were ever a time to be calling for the potential crash of the Canadian housing bubble, this is it.

Of course, I know well enough that predicting the Canadian housing market crash is futile, and even just by writing such a prediction, I may just delay the event by another few years. However, it is only the most foolish of investors who believe that everything will go peachy all the time and those who refuse to understand where the bubble-believers are coming from are only setting themselves up for huge failure should the event actually come about.

In this article, we are going to look at the state of the Canadian housing bubble in 2022, factors that may contribute to a crash coming soon, and some reasons why it may not happen just yet.