A recent report by Ottawa’s fiscal watchdog revealed that the average house prices in Halifax exceed what most households can afford by 74 percent. According to Louis Perrault, the director of policy, there has been no improvement in affordability since the previous assessment conducted in February 2022.
While cities like Toronto and Hamilton have seen an improvement in affordability, Halifax stands out among the 11 Canadian cities studied for having the widest gap between house prices and what the typical household can afford. The report highlighted that post-pandemic, house prices have moderated in some expensive areas but continue to rise in markets like Halifax.
Halifax Realtor Umme Sardar compared the current housing market in Halifax to the seller’s market in the Greater Toronto Area in the early 2000s. Sardar mentioned a slight softening in the condo and higher-priced home market in Halifax, attributing the continuous price rise to the high demand surpassing the supply.
The Nova Scotia Association of Realtors reported that homes in Halifax-Dartmouth were selling for over $600,000 on average in the first nine months of the year, marking a 3.9 percent increase from the previous year. The report also analyzed how households are stretching their finances to buy homes based on mortgage debt service ratios, showing a significant deterioration in Halifax compared to a decade ago.
Currently, the typical household in Halifax would spend nearly one-fifth of their before-tax income on mortgage payments for an average house, almost double the measure recorded between 2012 and 2014. Despite this, Halifax’s debt service ratio is relatively better than other parts of the country, such as Vancouver, where households spend over one-third of their income on mortgage payments for an average home.