Where the Housing Boom Never Ends

Real estate dominates Canada’s economy to an alarming degree

Ari Altstedter and Kevin Orland

In December, Aaron Moore bought an unremarkable three-bedroom house in the Toronto suburb of Brampton and, after throwing on a fresh coat of paint and laying down new hardwood floors, put it right back on the market. He sold it this month for C$810,000 (about $651,000), a stunning 28% more than he paid.

Normally this kind of quick-buck speculation would be interpreted as a sign of a housing bubble. But Moore has been a professional house flipper in the Toronto area for more than a decade, during which a seemingly endless line of illustrious doomsayers have taken the other side of his bet on real estate, only to be proven wrong.

Mark Carney, then Canada’s central bank governor, called the country’s reliance on housing wealth “unsustainable” back in 2012. Then came the wave of U.S. financiers whose collective bet on a Canadian housing crash was nicknamed “The Great White Short.” Among them was American investor Steve Eisman whose prescient call on the U.S. housing collapse earned him top billing in Michael Lewis’s 2010 book The Big Short.