CMHC targeting shadow lenders

TORONTO • Canada’s housing agency is seeking more data on home loans from shadow lenders, amid concern rising levels of debt aren’t being adequately tracked and may increase the risk of financial instability.

Canada Mortgage & Housing Corp. will seek data from participants in the securitization program on their uninsured conventional mortgage lending, said Evan Siddall, chief executive officer at the agency. CMHC needs to “know what risk we are exposed to,” so will use the reported information to decide if changes are needed to their rules, he said.

“We are concerned about increasing levels of riskier mortgage activity by nonfederally-regulated financial institutions,” Siddall said in the text of a speech he gave in Montreal on Tuesday.

“We have a responsibility to isolate sound, solvent institutions from the contagion that can erupt when a lender fails.”

Various levels of government recently introduced restrictions on mortgage lending to get a handle on what seemed like out of control increases in home prices. That’s pushing buyers who no longer qualify for insured home loans to take out mortgages with institutions that aren’t tracked by federal regulators.

CMHC is raising the alarm after Home Capital Group Inc.’s near-collapse this year called into question the stability of the country’s housing market.

Insured mortgages in the two most expensive housing markets are dropping, Siddall said. In Toronto, insured loans comprised 16 per cent of the market last year, compared to 27 per cent in 2010 and in Vancouver, those figures are 12 per cent and 20 per cent.

In addition, indicators of risk are rising for low-ratio mortgages — those where the buyer has staked at least 20 per cent of the purchase price up front, Siddall said.

Some 27 per cent of borrowers who took out lowratio mortgage in 2016 had a loan-to-income ratio higher than 450 per cent, up from 19 per cent in 2014, CMHC said.