VanDusen Botanical Gardens
  
We managed to visit the Vandusen botanical gardens before they closed for the spring. It's surely a meticulously designed scenery of lights for anyone looking to be wowed by Christmas lights that have been taken to the next level.
I also learned VanDusen is a very calm and beautiful garden with many diverse plant species in the day time. I'm glad I visited this garden; this is a very welcoming place for families/couples.
If you're a young guy looking to pop the question to your sweetheart, then this is surely a place to mark down as a potential location. The looks and feel might be an obvious giveaway, buy hey perhaps she doesn't care about surprises lol.
What does Trump's Tariff War Mean for Mortgage Rates?
Legendary investor, Warren Buffet, called the tariffs an "act of war."
Before the tariffs were imposed, we expected roughly 2% growth this year. Assuming the tariffs remain in place for a year, the Canadian economy will plunge into recession. We will likely see a few quarters of negative growth before growth gradually resumes.
Despite the inflation risk, the Bank of Canada will respond aggressively to minimize the meltdown in labour markets and the economy in general. When the Governing Council meets again on March 12, we expect another 25 bps cut in the overnight policy rate, bringing it down to 2.75%. Over the next year, we expect the Bank to continue to ease credit conditions.
The Canadian 5-year yield, a bellwether for setting fixed mortgage rates, has fallen to 2.51%, its lowest level in nearly three years. Lower interest rates are favorable for housing markets, although the inevitable rise in unemployment and drop in spending will mitigate this effect.
Dr. Sherry Cooper
Chief Economist, Dominion Lending Centres
The Challenges of Gifting Your Family Funds For A Downpayment
For over 25 years now I have been working with the same law firm (with 11 offices) to help my clients complete the legal work of buying a home and registering a mortgage. The article below has been provided by Tony Spagnuolo of Spagnuolo and Company Real Estate Lawyers. I have seen hundreds of families provide a gift to their children to help with the downpayment to buy a home. This article should be considered a request to pause for a moment (and where necessary get legal advice) when providing funds for a gifted downpayment.
It’s no surprise to readers of this newsletter that real estate (and life!) is expensive. It’s hard if not impossible for young adults to enter the real estate market without help. The Bank of Mom and Dad is one way that young adults have been able to gain a toehold in the market.
One way a parent can help their children is to give an outright gift. Parents give all or part of the down payment to their kids. Legal tidbit of the day: it is a condition of (almost) every mortgage that a borrower does not have additional financing on their home – in other words, having a second mortgage is a technical breach of the first mortgage. To satisfy this bank requirement, parents sometimes write gift letters to their kids – saying that the gift is a true gift, the parents aren’t loaning it to them, etc.
However, this strategy may come with risks! A gift letter may be used against a parent by an aggrieved creditor down the road (think: ex-spouse). We recently read about a BC dad who can’t get back $500k he gave to his now-separated son and daughter in law for their home purchase (https://biv.com/news/economy-law-politics/bc-dad-cant-get-back-500k-he-gave-now-separated-son-daughter-in-law-for-home-10104723).
There’s a lot of other factors at play in this case, but importantly in our mind, the gift letter that the parent gave to their child ended up being used as evidence that the money was meant as a gift and not a loan. In other words, the son and ex-spouse split the gift 50/50 versus the son receiving 100% of the gift.
There are a number of ways to mitigate this risk without upsetting the bank giving the first mortgage. Each strategy has varying levels of certainty and risk, and some are more expensive than others. But if you, or your clients, are planning on helping their child enter the market, it is certainly worth a conversation with a legal professional.
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