CANADA.... HOMEOWNERS TURN EYES TOWARDS CALGARY REAL. ESTATE MARKET...AS ITS PRICED OUT IN ONTARIO

By Chandrayee Roy Choudhury, Canada:

As Ontario's sizzling real estate market puts home ownership out of reach for many Canadians, a growing number of prospective buyers are looking west in hopes of achieving their white-picket-fence dreams.



Like newlyweds Vineet Mrug and Kushbu Mistry, who relocated to Calgary from their hometown of Toronto last year, some residents of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and other hot Ontario markets are moving to Alberta for what they believe is their last opportunity to own an affordable piece of real estate in a large Canadian city.





Realtors in the western province are also buzzing with anecdotes about what they say is an unusually high number of inquiries from Ontario.



Those stories appear to be backed up by Statistics Canada data, which says Alberta led the country in interprovincial migration in the fourth quarter of 2021, for the first time since 2015. On a net basis, the majority of Alberta's new interprovincial migrants in the fourth quarter came from Ontario.



But even as Calgary home prices rise, they are low in comparison to what prospective homebuyers are facing in other parts of the country. In Toronto, the average selling price in March of 2022 was $1.3 million, according to The Canadian Real Estate Association, while the composite benchmark price in Metro Vancouver for the same month was $1.4 million.