BMO is now luring 5-year fixed borrowers with 1% cash back. If you get a $400,000 five-year BMO mortgage, that’s $4k in your pocket. In fact, the bank will rebate up to $30,000 if you qualify and your mortgage is big enough. The catch: you need to pay the mortgage from a BMO chequing account. If you don’t have one,...

Oh the lengths people will go to squeeze themselves into a new property. That includes putting their home, or at least part of it, on their credit card. Yep, believe it or not, some lenders are more than happy to let you borrow your down payment off a credit card. And government-backed default insurers support it. That’s despite Ottawa outlawing...

Mortgage Finance Companies (MFCs) pitch themselves as a better alternative to the banks. But that’s definitely not true in all cases. Here’s one example. At the moment, certain MFCs are refusing to offer blends and increases and/or refinances to existing customers. They’re doing this despite marketing those very same “features” to the brokers who sell their mortgages, who in turn...

It’s easy to stoke fear of a crisis when there’s already a purported crisis. Towering housing valuations in Canada’s internationally renowned cities have prompted bubble-talk for years. Housing bears are constantly speculating on what it’s going to take to “pop” it. Well, now we have a pin, some say:  Home Capital’s scandalous potential failure. But we don’t see it that way. Despite...

When it comes to the best variable rates, the trend has become our friend. Floating rates continue to creep lower after spiking at the end of 2015. Much of the improvement is thanks to shrinking credit spreads. In other words, lenders have been paying less to access short-term capital in the financial markets than a few months ago. Another part of the equation is...

Not So Fast… A slew of lenders have hoisted fixed mortgage rates in the last few weeks. Their motivation was the recent spike in government bond yields, which hit multi-month highs and (temporarily) boosted banks’ funding costs. Meanwhile, numerous lenders simply absorbed those higher yields and kept their rates as-is. For mortgage providers, staying price-competitive is not optional in the March through June stretch,...

No rate-cut drama today. The Bank of Canada left its key lending rate at 0.50% this morning, a move expected by about half the market. Mortgage Impact: Banks weren’t about to cut prime by more than 5-15 basis points anyway (a basis point is 1/100th of a per cent), so this news is not overly momentous for variable-rate mortgage holders—not in the near-term...

Variable mortgage rates are under some pressure. A half-dozen lenders, including some major banks and large non-bank lenders, have shrunk their variable-rate discounts by 0.10 to 0.15 percentage points in the last few days. Their going rate is now prime – 0.50%. Lenders blame it on a combination of: Shrinking mortgage spreads (Spread refers to the difference between what a lender lends at and its cost...

Got a hot rate tip? The Spy buys rate Intel. The Top 2 rate tips of the month earn a crisp C-note! Here’s the fine print. The rate must be: A rate that is at least 5 basis points lower than the lowest rate currently advertised by RateSpy.com for that term A current rate offered by a lender (not a broker) and...

Credit unions are slowly and stealthily becoming a force in mortgage lending. We may not see any one credit union become consistently dominant, but CUs are certainly working together to promote their value. At any given time, you can expect one or more CUs to run an exceptional mortgage offer. A prime example was Meridian Credit Union’s 2.99% special that...