As part of the review of its mortgage loan insurance business, CMHC is discontinuing its Second Home and Self-Employed Without 3rd Party Income Validation mortgage insurance products effective May 30, 2014. Self-employed Canadians can still qualify for CMHC insured financing through CMHC homeowner products with a validation of their income using traditional methods.

CMHC Second Home and Self-Employed Without 3^rd Party Income Validation will remain available for new mortgage loan insurance requests submitted to CMHC before May 30, 2014, regardless of the closing date of the home purchase. As is normal practice, complete borrower and property details must be submitted by a lender to CMHC when requesting mortgage loan insurance.

For the majority of self-employed borrowers, income validation is readily available. To validate their income, self-employed borrowers can provide copies of their Notice of Assessment, audited financial statements or unaudited financial statements prepared by an independent third party, for the previous two year period.

The Week in Economic and Real Estate News

Recently we learned that Canada’s two private mortgage insurers, Genworth and Canada Guarantee, will not match the changes CMHC announced to its product line-up the week before. But they will each modify their Second Home products by restricting eligible properties to one unit.

The Vancouver and Calgary real estate boards reported April results last week. Volumes in Vancouver were well up from a year ago as conditions there approach a seller’s market. In Calgary, new listings grew enough to provide some relief to tight market conditions and prices were up about 10% from a year ago. 

According to US Department of Labour statistics released last week, The American economy increased its pace of job creation in April, pushing the unemployment rate to 6.3%, its lowest level in more than five years. More than 200,000 new jobs have been created in the US for three consecutive months. 

The benchmark government of Canada five year bond yield ended the week at 1.63%, down from 1.67% the previous week. A month ago, it was 1.75%.