Debbie Thomas, partner and broker of record at The Mortgage Group, recently told CMP she has noticed a trend of insurance guidelines tightening for self-employed borrowers, who often write off a large portion of their income for tax purposes.

"The whole issue of reasonability has now been forced back and self-employed deals that used to be approved are not even close to being approved today," said Thomas. "It hasn't been an announcement or anything that has come out from the lenders or insurers, but it's something we've definitely noticed."

The different housing market outcomes in Canada and the U.S. can tell us something about the underlying causes of the housing boom and subsequent bust in the latter. In particular, they can be used to evaluate the roles that low interest rates and relaxed lending standards played.

Monetary Policy and the U.S. Housing Bust Some observers blame monetary policy for lowering interest rates over 2002-2005, pushing up housing demand, increasing residential investment and raising housing prices. In this view, the monetary-policy induced housing boom thus set the stage for an inevitable housing bust.

The low interest rate policy of the Federal Reserve over 2001-2005 is often cited as a key factor in the U.S. housing bust. The main narrative is that by lowering short-term interest rates, longer-maturity mortgage interest rates are pushed down. This increases the demand for housing, puts upward pressure on housing prices and encourages builders to ramp-up construction of new homes. This leads to an "oversupply" of new homes, which triggered the housing bust in the U.S.

There are also claims that interest rates were too low over 2001-2005, when looked at by both historical standards, as well as compared to those predicted by the Taylor rule (a monetary policy rule which relates U.S. Federal Reserve's ideal target rates to inflation and GDP).

The Bank of Canada made dramatic reductions in its target interest rate over 2001-2002, but one might argue that Canadian monetary policy was not quite as "loose" as that in the U.S. as it maintained a higher overnight rate over 2002 to 2004.

But a case can be made that Canadian and American monetary policies were very similar, at least in terms of the housing market. Estimates put the deviations from the Taylor rule for Canada and the U.S. over 2001-2006 to be nearly identical. In fact, the two benchmark mortgage interest rates move closely with one another until after the beginning of the U.S. housing market crisis, when U.S. rates fell significantly below Canadian rates.

Mortgage interest rates-the main direct channel through which monetary policy impacts the housing market-tracked each other closely in the two countries, but unlike the U.S., where the mainstay of the mortgage market is the 30-year fixed mortgage, the most common mortgage product in Canada is a five-year fixed-rate mortgage (with a 25-year amortization period).

Relaxed Lending Standards: different subprime lending booms
Another leading explanation of the housing boom and bust relies critically on relaxed lending standards. This story is linked to the dramatic rise in subprime lending and high levels of loan securitization, which some commentators have argued reduced the incentives for mortgage originators to maintain underwriting standards. This is one area where there was a significant difference between the two countries, both in the size and nature of the subprime market and in the fraction of mortgages securitized.

Subprime lending has grown rapidly in both countries, though the magnitude has been far more striking in the U.S. While subprime mortgages accounted for less than five per cent of mortgage originations in the U.S. in 1994, one-fifth of all mortgages originated between 2004 and 2006 were subprime.
But while subprime lending also increased in Canada, it remained much smaller than in the U.S.

The most cited estimate is that subprime lenders had a market share of roughly five per cent in 2006, compared to 22 per cent in the U.S. Moreover, the Canadian subprime market never expanded significantly into newer products, such as interest-only or negative amortization mortgages, whose popularity grew rapidly in the U.S. from 2003 to 2006. Instead, the Canadian subprime market mainly offered products popularized in the U.S. during the 1990s, such as longer amortization periods for loans (from 25 to 40 years), and mainly targeted near-prime borrowers.

Securitization has also been less common in Canada than in the United States, with roughly 25 per cent of Canadian mortgages securitized in 2007 versus nearly 60 per cent in the U.S. The Canadian securitization market has grown rapidly over the past decade, rising from roughly five per cent of mortgages in 1998 to over 25 per cent in 2008.

However, in many ways, the Canadian market resembles the early stages of the U.S. mortgage securitization market, as most securitized mortgages in Canada are backed by an explicit government guarantee. This government guarantee requires limits on borrowers' debt-service ratios and amortization periods, which makes it more difficult for lenders to offer some types of subprime loans.

The subprime story is also consistent with the different pattern of mortgage delinquencies in Canada and the U.S. In the U.S., mortgage delinquencies for both prime and nonprime mortgages began to rise before the recession began and unemployment rates began to climb.

In contrast, mortgage delinquencies in Canada have only recently begun to increase, after unemployment rates started rising and the Canadian and world economies slowed sharply in the fall of 2008. Finally, the relaxed lending story is consistent with the fact that the U.S. experienced a housing bust over 2007-2009 while Canada did not.

While the expansion of subprime lending provided a temporary boost to housing price growth rates, when prices stopped rising, the inability of some borrowers to refinance homes they could not afford led to a spike of delinquencies. The resulting increase in liquidation and foreclosure sales put additional downward pressure on house prices, which, in turn, pushed more borrowers into default. This negative feedback cycle helped push a correction in the housing market into a housing bust.

One possible critique of this argument is that while Canada has not yet experienced a housing bust, it is likely to experience one in the next year. Indeed, a recent Merrill-Lynch- Canada report noted that Canadian house prices over the past decade closely resemble U.S. house prices with a two-year lag. Based on this, they concluded that Canada was also likely to experience large decline in house prices over the coming year.

Canada's smaller subprime market share and fewer households with high LTV ratios, however, suggest that the country is less likely to see the rapid increase in defaults that helped trigger the bust in U.S. housing prices. So far the incoming data suggest that the Canadian housing market is likely to experience a housing market slowdown rather than a bust.

Why was the subprime market in Canada smaller?
Given the key role played by the "subprime" market, the question is why the Canadian subprime market was both smaller and levels of securitization were lower than in the U.S. While it is difficult to disentangle the reasons why Canada avoided the subprime boom, some factors can be identified that may have contributed to the differences in the Canadian and U.S. subprime markets.

Perhaps the simplest story is that Canada was lucky to be a late adopter of U.S. innovations rather than an innovator in mortgage finance. While the subprime share of the Canadian market was small, it was growing rapidly prior to the onset of the U.S. subprime crisis. In response to the U.S. crisis, some subprime lenders exited the Canadian market due to difficulties in securing funding. In addition, the Canadian government moved in July 2008 to tighten the standards for mortgage insurance required for high LTV loans originated by federally regulated financial institutions.

This further limited the ability of Canadian banks to directly offer subprime-type products to borrowers.
There are also several institutional details that played a role. For one, the Canadian market lacks a counterpart to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, both of which played a significant role in the growth of securitization in the U.S.

Secondly, bank capital regulation in Canada treats off-balance sheet vehicles more strictly than the U.S., and the stricter treatment reduces the incentive for Canadian banks to move mortgage loans to off-balance sheet vehicles. Finally, government-mandated mortgage insurance for high LTV loans issued by Canadian banks effectively made it impossible for banks to offer certain subprime products. This likely slowed the growth of the subprime market in Canada, as nonbank intermediaries had to organically grow origination networks.

The Canada-U.S. comparison suggests the low interest rate policy of the central banks in both countries contributed to the housing boom over 2001-2006, but that a relaxation of lending standards in the U.S. was the critical factor in setting the stage for the housing bust.

A caveat worth emphasizing, however, is that it tells us little about what would have happened if U.S. monetary policy had been tighter earlier, as tighter monetary policy in the early part of the decade may have helped to limit the subprime boom by slowing the rate of house price appreciation over 2002-2006.

One thing the comparison does highlight, however, is the practical challenge facing policy-makers in assessing whether a rapid run-up in asset prices is actually a bubble, or just a sustainable movement in market prices.

Following a report in Saturday's Globe and Mail that banking officials have called for tighter mortgage rules to stave off a housing collapse, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty told reporters he does not see signs of a housing bubble in Canada.

According to the paper, Flaherty made the comments following the weekend's finance summit. Although he said there were some "signals in the market that are concerning," he added there is no "compelling evidence" of a housing bubble. He did, however, remind the Globe and Mail that he has policy tools available to "take action to counter negative trends."

"I have used some of them before and can use some or all of them again," Flaherty said, making reference to the government's decision to disallow zero-down mortgages and 40-year amortizations in 2008.

The discussion of tightening mortgage rules surfaced in December when Flaherty mentioned the possibility of increasing down payment and amortization periods to cool off the housing market. The Globe said the Department of Finance has canvassed the mortgage industry for ideas on whether tighter mortgage rules are needed.

CAAMP's Jim Murphy told the newspaper that it would have "serious concerns" with ten per cent down payments, while Canadian Mortgage Trends' Robert McLister said the CMHC has already "increased its vigilance" on mortgage insurance approvals.

Housing starts hit a 15-month high according to a real estate report today, as media all across Canada continued to speculate whether the latest gains had stretched too far.

The Wall Street Journal and Canadian Business were amongst the publications recently to ask whether Canada's surprise performance in real estate was the start of a boom in the industry, or instead was nearing a bubble about to burst.

Rather than anything dramatic, however, most experts in the real estate industry still see 2010 as another strong year with a slowing of price gains in the second half as supply increases.

The seasonally adjusted annual rate of housing starts reached 186,300 units in January, up 5.8 per cent from 176,100 in December, according to the CMHC.

In January last year, housing starts began the year with 149,081 units, with activity progressing as the year went on.

Regionally, B.C. had largest increase in housing starts, with a 19.8 per cent jump in housing units in the province. In the Prairie region, the seasonally adjusted rate of urban starts decreased by 4.8 per cent.