‘Bank of Mom and Dad’: StatCan report shows home ownership runs in the family

globalnews.ca:

If your parents are homeowners, you’re twice as likely to own a home as those without a generational stake in the housing market, according to a new Statistics Canada analysis on the impact of the “Bank of Mom and Dad.”

The agency’s report released Monday looked at home ownership rates among those born in the 1990s and compared cohorts of parents who were owners and those who weren’t. Overall, Canadians born in this decade had a home ownership rate of 15.5 per cent, though those rates rise the older the person in the cohort.

Within this group, StatCan found that the adult children of non-homeowners had a home ownership rate of 8.1 per cent as of 2021. But for those whose parents were homeowners, the ownership rate rose to 17.4 per cent.

If a parent owned multiple properties, the odds of their children owning a home rose to 23.1 per cent — nearly triple the odds of kids without home-owning parents.

The StatCan report did not consider whether financial gifts were part of the adult children buying a home, but did cite separate studies about the growing prominence of intergenerational wealth transfer helping to fund home purchases.

The report also found that income played a significant role for those included in the study: non-owners reported an average income of $36,000, compared with $65,000 among those owning property. But StatCan also found a correlation between parents who owned one or more properties and the relatively higher income among their children.

StatCan found that the degree to which having a home-owning parent made a difference to adult children owning as well was the greatest in Ontario and British Columbia — Canada’s most expensive housing markets.

“This may signal that in housing markets with higher