Posthaste: In Canada's housing market, it matters who your parents are

financialpost.com:

Getting on the property ladder is so tough these days more young Canadians despair of ever getting to the first rung.

Prices have cooled since the pandemic housing boom, but higher mortgage rates are a new hurdle for would-be buyers.

The average selling price of a home in Canada in October was $656,625, up 1.8 per cent from a year ago. The average price in Toronto hit $1,125,928 last month, and in Vancouver it reached $1,196,500.

A new study by Statistics Canada has found that some Canadians have an advantage for getting on that ladder over others — their parents.

The study, according to the agency, provides the first detailed analysis of the relationship between parents who own property and the likelihood of their children owning a home, using tax data and data from the Canadian Housing Statistics Program.

It found that adult children born in the 1990s whose parents were homeowners were twice as likely to own a home than those whose parents were not homeowners.

Children of homeowners had a homeownership rate of 17.4 per cent, compared with a homeownership rate of 8.1 per cent for the children of parents who did not own a home.

The homeownership rate of children whose parents owned more than one property was even higher at 23.8 per cent, nearly triple the rate of the children of non-homeowners.

“The analysis establishes a robust positive relationship between parents’ property ownership and the likelihood of homeownership for their adult children, even when controlling for income, age and province of residence,” said authors Michael Mirdamadi and Aisha Khalid.

“Inequality of homeownership appears to be reproduced across generations as parents’ property ownership conveys significant financial advantages to their children.”