Montreal Foreclosure
are up 36%
With the sub-prime crash in the united states, Americans have seen foreclosure rates jump in the last year. In some regions of the country, foreclosure rates have gone up as much as 1500%. This means that a lot of people are losing their homes and it has become harder for home buyers to secure financing for their purchase.The cause of this disaster is mainly attributed to Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs). ARMs are also known as teaser rate mortgages because they initially offer very low interest rates and increase them gradually.
This means that buyers can benefit from very low monthly payments initially, but these balloon very quickly to amounts that they cannot afford and they end up losing their home. Rates can increase as much as 2 times over the period of just a few years.
What does this mean for the Canadian Real Estate and Mortgage market? Although the lending situation in Canada is much different from the American's, our fate has always been closely tied to our southernly neighbors. Canadian lenders do offer adjustable rate mortgages, but Canadian home buyers have mainly stayed on the safe course and opted for fixed rate mortgages.
Regardless of our safer attitude towards borrowing money, a recent report has seen an increase of 36% in Montreal Foreclosures since 2007. This either means that there has been an increase in negligent home owners or that they may be a slowing down of the Canadian economy.
One man's crisis is another's opportunity. This is real estate investment gold. With the special foreclosure laws that exist in Quebec that allow bank to make profit on the repossessed homes, the trick to making the real deals is to get these properties in pre-foreclosures.
Of course you can still get a nice discount on foreclosures, but the real money is made by finding, contacting and negotiating with those home owners that are in pre-foreclosure. They may not want to sell their home, but the bank is only 60 days away from taking it back.
Home owners in this situation are never happy about letting go of "their equity", but like I always say:"It's your equity until you stop paying the mortgage. Then it's the bank's"
