It's a voter-friendly move, but I like it. People have complained forever they can't get into the market, and this is a step forward in giving those buyers who are close enough a bit of help. I prefer this much more than the government status quo which comprise:

- There's nothing we can do, it's the other levels of government who aren't doing anything...
- We don't want to negatively affect homeowners by reducing demand and market values...
- Etc...

interest free for 25 years.

From the existing property purchase tax. If i'm going to pay a tax, i'd rather it be used for something like this as opposed to general coffers.

What

It's not. It's only interest-free for the first 5 years. The borrower has 25 years to pay the loan back at conventional mortgage rates after the first 5 years.

Nevertheless, I can see this program helping out certain types of people, like high income earners just under 150K who can't save up for a down payment, or people who are down to one income as a result of child-rearing.

lol :facepalm::facepalm::facepalm:

yeah but if you like it, so will hundreds of others, and what do you think that will do in terms of competition? if anything we could see an adverse effect in terms of affordability especially for the sub $750k condo/townhouse market.

Whoops, I clearly misread that part of the article. No wonder I was so quick to defend this program ;)

I've read it a few times, but maybe someone can explain it differently. It's interest free for 5 years, that I understand. Do you have to repay any of that interest after the 5 year period is over?

Or is it basically locking into a 5 year mortgage with a 0% interest rate which the government subsidizes? Then once the 5 years is up, you refinance and lock into a fixed or variable rate (whatever rates are at in 2022). Is this correct?

That's basically it based on my reading of the FAQ on BC Housing.

Taken straight from BC Housing:

What is the repayment process?

While the first five years is interest and payment free, the homeowner may make additional payments or repay the loan in full at any time with no penalty.

At the beginning of the sixth year, interest will start accruing and the homeowner will begin making principal and interest payments, amortized over the remaining 20 years.

The BC HOME Partnership loan is due and payable in full upon any of the following:

Default on the first mortgage or the BC HOME Partnership loan.
Transfer of the home or change of ownership (including addition of a person to title).
The home is no longer the purchaser’s principal residence in the first five years.

Demand will continue to grow no matter what. Maybe this program convinces builders to increase supply aimed specifically at the sub $750k level? I agree that increasing supply is critical to this, but several factors are at play when it comes to the supply side,. Some of those factors nobody can control (like our geography) and some need to be better handled by the municipal government along with provincial.

Yep.

That's the whole point - to keep construction and the real estate industries going. This will also encourage developers and municipalities to build and approve more supply.

Interest earned from government student loans :troll: :awwyeah:

i hope people arent so stupid as to get on board with that platformthat the NDP is spouting off about

BC has the second lowest income tax rate in canada. if we "eliminate the MSP", it will just simply be hidden into income tax like other provinces.

:pokerface:

"Hey you can't save enough to buy a place? Okay here's 30k, pay us pack ontop of your new $3000 mortgage"

So many people are going to fuck them selves.

People were stupid enough to shoot down the HST, so I don't hold my breathe.

In reference to the last post, that was the main argument of a few economists I heard on that radio today, this will essentially enable people who already have large amounts of personal debt to take on even more in the form of a mortgage

To be fair, a good chunk of that opposition was due to the way the tax was introduced and implemented (For the record I was pro HST). That said, I'm in agreement with you. People be irrational.

The way it was implemented can definitely criticized, the tax itself probably shouldn't have been judged on that but the general public obviously doesn't think that way

I think of it as: "Here's a loan to help you get a bigger loan!"

It reeks of USA Subprime to me.... Offered by the government.

The policy is already widely panned by economists. But like I said, anything to buy some extra votes, right?

there are people who could benefit from it. me for example

my wife and i have a healthy income, but ive also spent the last 7 years building a business and all my cash goes back into it. so we didn't really have a huge amount saved. we ended up saving and scraping up most of what we needed, and borrowed a bit from family. so for us, affordability isnt the issue at all. it was the up front saving, while still paying $2k a month in rent.

in Kelowna, you really need to be shopping in the $600k mark to enter into the single family home market, and with minimum down, plus PTT and other closing costs, thats just under $50k needed up front. obviously vancouver is quite abit worse than that.
having a no interest loan from the government to help with that would have really helped us get into the market sooner, if we didn't borrow from family.

house prices have climbed to a point where minimum down payments have grown beyond reasonable saving for alot of people. the government needed to do something to help first time home buyers, since $475k PTT threshhold is a joke now. it allows people to enter into the market sooner, and start building equity and wealth sooner. we figured that waiting another year to buy would have cost us about $60,000 in lost equity and rent payments.

i think this should be more on the lines of, "hey, you have 15% down. You've shown you can be responsible with your income, here is a 5% top up to help you down the road." Now it's just helping the ones with 0 down, over leverage themselves when they couldn't even save a dime before hand. Obviously there are people like Rxstar who don't fall into this catagory but there certainly is a lot who will.

Economists: Interest rates are going up. Prepare yourselves for a correction.

BC Liberals: Here's some free money. Go all out. :toot:

This goes completely against why the federal government imposed a few months ago.

The writing is on the wall that interest rates are going to go up..

locked into dat 5 year fixed at 2.49 :awwyeah: