September 2026.

Rate Watch, week of September 28: the week opened on the one quarterly release that shows what is happening inside the part of the Canadian mortgage market the chartered banks do not hold, and the number worth reading in it is not the total. Its next two days ran the other way: a flat gross domestic product print whose one clearly expanding goods sector was construction, and then a federal holiday on which Statistics Canada published nothing and the Bank of Canada was closed. This entry covers Monday September 28 through Wednesday September 30. Thursday October 1 belongs to the same ISO week, which runs to Sunday October 4, but it is carried in the October entry instead, because the month turned inside the week rather than at its edge and one month's entries cannot sit in another month's archive. The Daily for Monday September 28 carried six releases, lettered a through f, and g returned a 404. They were: railway carloadings for July 2026, food services and drinking places for July 2026, the Survey of Drinking Water Plants for 2024, monthly estimates of business openings and closures for June 2026, the Survey of Non-Bank Mortgage Lenders for the second quarter of 2026, and an announcement concerning Transportation and Supply Chain Indexes. One of the six touches this publication's subject and it is the fifth of them. Nothing in a letter tells you which release it holds, and this one sat between a drinking-water survey and a transportation announcement. Total outstanding residential mortgages held by Canadian non-bank lenders reached $420.2 billion in the second quarter of 2026, up 1.5% from $413.8 billion in the first quarter and 2.5% from $409.9 billion in the second quarter of 2025. The number of mortgages behind that balance moved the other way. Non-bank lenders held 1,823,471 residential mortgages at the end of the second quarter, 21,099 fewer than the 1,844,570 of a year earlier, a decline of 1.1%, and almost exactly level with the first quarter's 1,821,447. More dollars spread across fewer loans is an average balance that rises without any individual borrower's payment changing: $230,420 per mortgage in the second quarter of 2026 against $222,208 a year earlier, up 3.7%. Insured balances were $136.9 billion and uninsured balances $283.2 billion, so 67.4% of this book carried no mortgage insurance, and the uninsured side grew faster over the year, 2.8% against 1.9%. The composition by lender type is where the quarter turned. Credit unions held $295.2 billion, up $7.25 billion or 2.5% over the quarter and 2.6% over the year. Mortgage investment entities, the mortgage investment corporations and private funds that lend at the higher-rate end of this market, held $35.9 billion, down $1.90 billion or 5.0% over the quarter and 3.9% over the year, and were the only one of the three categories smaller than a year earlier. Other non-bank lenders, a category that includes mortgage finance companies, trusts and insurance companies, held $89.1 billion, up 1.1% over the quarter and 5.0% over the year. Those three figures sum to the $420.2 billion total exactly, which is the arithmetic check worth doing before quoting any one of them on its own. Money moved toward the regulated, deposit-taking end of the non-bank market and away from the private end. One quarter is not a trend and this series is not seasonally adjusted, so read that as a direction to watch rather than a turn. Arrears are where this release says something the headline total does not. The number of non-bank mortgages in arrears was 45,247 at the end of the second quarter, 15,271 of them insured and 29,976 uninsured, which is 132 fewer than the 45,379 of a year earlier, a decline of 0.3%. On a count-based reading nothing happened: 2.48% of these mortgages were in arrears against 2.46% a year earlier. The dollars read differently. Balances in arrears totalled $12.13 billion, up 12.6% from $10.78 billion a year earlier, so arrears moved from 2.63% of all non-bank balances to 2.89%. The same number of borrowers were behind, on materially larger loans: the average non-bank mortgage in arrears carried $268,102 in the second quarter of 2026 against $237,471 a year earlier, and against an all-mortgage average of $230,420. Whatever is behind this is reaching mortgages larger than the typical one on these books. The depth of the arrears moved further than the breadth. Balances more than ninety days overdue, the bucket a lender provisions against rather than waits out, reached $2.51 billion in the second quarter of 2026, $385.9 million of it insured and $2.13 billion uninsured, against $1.95 billion a year earlier. That is a rise of $567.1 million, or 29.1%, and it had risen in five consecutive quarters to get there: $1.83 billion in the first quarter of 2025, then $1.95 billion, $2.06 billion, $2.14 billion, $2.38 billion and $2.51 billion. Deeply overdue balances were 20.7% of all arrears dollars in this quarter against 18.1% a year earlier, and 0.60% of every dollar these lenders had outstanding against 0.47%. A flat arrears count, rising arrears dollars, and a rising share of those dollars sitting past ninety days together describe borrowers who are not falling behind in greater numbers but are staying behind longer, on larger balances. Four limits on what this release can be asked to say. It covers non-bank lenders only, which Statistics Canada defines as credit unions, mortgage finance companies, trusts, insurance companies, mortgage investment corporations and private lenders, and which includes entities that purchase mortgages as well as those that issue them. The chartered banks are not in it, so this is a slice of the Canadian mortgage market rather than the whole of it. The data are not seasonally adjusted, which the release states plainly, so quarter-over-quarter comparisons carry whatever seasonality this market has. The reference period ended June 30, three months before this entry, so none of it is a read on September conditions or on the fixed-rate repricing carried in the previous two entries. And the figures come from table 33-10-0530; a related view, 33-10-0530-02, breaks outstanding balances down by province, available from the first quarter of 2025 onward. Set this beside the 2024 Canadian Housing Survey results on housing affordability carried earlier this month, which found that the households falling behind on shelter costs were increasingly the ones with mortgages rather than the ones renting. These are different sources measuring different years, a household survey for 2024 against a lender-side administrative series for the second quarter of 2026, so neither one confirms the other. What is worth noticing is that they point the same way from opposite ends of the same transaction, and that the lender-side series is the more current of the two. Tuesday September 29 brought eight Statistics Canada releases, lettered a through h, and i returned a 404. They were: gross domestic product by industry for July 2026, a study on perceptions of democracy in Canada, energy statistics for July 2026, film and video distribution for 2025, industrial research and development including energy and intellectual property expenditures, a data availability announcement for the Shared Health Priorities Indicators for Children and Youth, the Couriers and Messengers Services Price Index for August 2026, and the Freight Rail Services Price Index for September 2026. The first of the eight is the one this publication reads, and as on the Monday nothing in the letter said so. Real gross domestic product by industry was essentially unchanged in July 2026, 0.0% on the month, with 10 of 20 industrial sectors expanding. Construction rose 1.3%, a fourth consecutive monthly increase, and Statistics Canada states that those four increases together offset the declines recorded during the final months of 2025 and the beginning of 2026. Every construction subsector expanded. Non-residential building construction rose 2.9%, which the agency calls the largest growth rate for that subsector since January 2022 and attributes to institutional work including the construction of a new hospital in Ontario, and engineering and other construction activities rose 1.5%. Residential building construction rose 0.9%, driven by higher home alterations and improvements and by increased activity in the new construction of most dwelling types. One sector up 1.3% inside a flat economy is the shape worth carrying rather than the headline zero: the goods-producing grouping was itself essentially unchanged, because construction and utilities were offset by manufacturing, down 0.9%, and by mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction, down 0.5%. Two service lines in the same release touch this subject more directly than their size suggests. Real estate and rental and leasing expanded 0.2% in July on broad-based increases, with real estate itself up 0.1% for a sixth consecutive monthly increase and rental and leasing services up 0.9%. Architectural, engineering and related services rose 0.5%, and the release ties that increase explicitly to the higher construction activity above, so the design end and the building end of the same pipeline moved together in the month. Two limits on the whole release. Revisions in it reach back to January 2025, so any monthly figure quoted from this series in an earlier entry may since have moved, and a reader checking one should re-read the table rather than the old sentence. And July is the reference month, not September, so none of it is a read on the fixed-rate repricing the previous two entries carried. August data, with an advance estimate for September, are scheduled for Friday October 30. Wednesday September 30 was the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, which the Bank of Canada's own holiday schedule lists as a national holiday. Statistics Canada published no Daily: dq260930a returned a 404, and that is what an unpublished day looks like rather than what a broken URL looks like, because the identical shape returned 200 for every letter enumerated on the two days either side of it. The Bank of Canada was closed. Treat the day as a closed session rather than a quiet one. Nothing was scheduled to print and nothing did, which is a different fact from a scheduled release that failed to appear, and the two should never be written up the same way. On the rate side the week opened where the last one closed. Ratehub's comparison table for five-year fixed mortgages, read on the morning of Monday September 28, carried a September 27, 2026, 5:19 p.m. update stamp, and its lowest advertised five-year fixed rate was 4.34%, shown against a Big 6 bank and against an entry listed as a Canadian Lender, with 4.44% from Alterna Savings, 4.49% from Meridian Credit Union and 4.59% from Scotiabank behind it. That is the same ladder that stood on both of Thursday September 24's stamps. Prime was 4.45%, unchanged since the September 2 hold, and cannot change before the Bank's next announcement on October 28. One thing on that page earns a warning rather than a citation. The written commentary around the table, read the same morning, described the lowest five-year fixed rate as having risen to 4.24% in the previous week, put the lowest five-year fixed at 4.09%, and named Scotiabank's five-year at 4.29% as of September 8, 2026, while the dated table directly beneath it carried 4.34% and put Scotiabank at 4.59%. The table is the part that is maintained. Read the stamp rather than the prose around it, and confirm any number with the lender before acting on it. The previous entry closed with two readings outstanding: Thursday September 24 and Friday September 25 had not been posted to the Bank of Canada's series when that entry was written on the morning of Friday September 25. They were not read on Monday September 28 either, and the reason is worth stating precisely because it is not the usual one: the Bank of Canada's rate pages and its data service both timed out repeatedly for this desk that morning, across two different HTTP clients. That was a fact about those readings rather than about the Bank's series. The series was reached on the morning of Thursday October 1, and all four of those sessions are closed out here. The five-year Government of Canada benchmark closed at 3.69% on Thursday September 24, at 3.65% on Friday September 25, at 3.68% on Monday September 28 and at 3.69% on Tuesday September 29. The previous entry's 3.69% close for Wednesday September 23 stands, and Thursday September 24 matched that reading rather than passing it. Across those four sessions the benchmark stayed inside the range the previous two entries had already described, and none of the four is a move a borrower would have noticed on a quote. The Tuesday close arrived mid-reading, and it is worth saying how: Tuesday September 29 had not been posted when the series was first read at 08:58 Eastern on Thursday October 1, and it was there eight minutes later at 3.69%, back level with the Wednesday September 23 and Thursday September 24 closes. That is the backfill this publication keeps describing, observed inside a single morning — a figure genuinely unavailable at one reading and published at the next — and it is the reason every level here is tied to a named session instead of to the present tense. Wednesday September 30 was a Bank holiday, so a close may never be posted for it at all, and it is the one session of the week so far that stays open. Diffing Monday September 28 against every source this publication scans, in both directions: one of them published. Statistics Canada published the six releases enumerated above. The Bank of Canada had no announcement and no Summary of Deliberations scheduled; its next interest rate announcement, with a Monetary Policy Report, is October 28, and its Business Outlook Survey is scheduled for Monday October 19, both as recorded in the previous entry's September 25 read of the Bank's calendar, which could not be re-read on this morning for the reason given above. That read also listed a fireside chat on Tuesday September 29, which falls in the next entry's window. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation's September housing starts had not printed as of Monday September 28; both of the slug shapes that corporation has used this year returned a 404 when tried that morning, and its August starts printed September 16 and are carried two entries back. The Canadian Real Estate Association published nothing; its own schedule page, re-read on Monday September 28, states that the next statistics package will be published on Friday October 16, 2026, so August stands as the latest national resale month until then. Freddie Mac publishes its Primary Mortgage Market Survey on Thursdays only; its rate history file, read on Monday September 28, ended with the week ending September 24 at a 7.03% 30-year fixed and a 6.42% 15-year fixed, the print carried in the previous entry, and the next one prints on Thursday October 1. The National Association of Realtors published nothing; its 2026 schedule, re-read that morning, lists nothing between the August Pending Home Sales Index of September 17 and September Existing-Home Sales on Tuesday October 13, followed by the September Pending Home Sales Index on Tuesday October 20 and third-quarter Metro Home Prices on Thursday October 29. The United States Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development published no housing release; the Census Bureau's own release calendar, read that morning, puts August Construction Spending on Wednesday September 30 at 8:30 Eastern, September New Residential Construction on Tuesday October 20, September New Residential Sales on Tuesday October 27 and third-quarter Housing Vacancies and Homeownership on Wednesday October 28. The Federal Reserve held no meeting; its next one is October 27 and 28, as recorded in the previous entry. Diffing Tuesday September 29 and Wednesday September 30 against every source this publication scans, in both directions. Statistics Canada published the eight releases enumerated above on the Tuesday and nothing on the Wednesday. The Bank of Canada published two items on the Tuesday and neither is a housing or a rate-setting release: remarks titled Repo markets and monetary policy implementation, and a joint statement with the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions on the use of the Bank's Standing Liquidity Facility. Those close out the September 29 appearance the Bank's calendar had listed and the previous paragraph of this entry flagged. Both concern the plumbing of bank funding rather than the cost of a mortgage, so this entry reports no figure from either and does not characterise them further. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation published no September housing starts on either day; both of the slug shapes that corporation has used this year returned a 404 when tried on Thursday October 1, and its August starts printed September 16 and are carried three entries back. The Canadian Real Estate Association published nothing; its schedule page, re-read on Thursday October 1, repeats that the next statistics package will be published on Friday October 16, 2026, so August stands as the latest national resale month until then. Freddie Mac publishes on Thursdays only and neither day was a Thursday. The National Association of Realtors published nothing; its 2026 schedule, re-read on Thursday October 1, lists September Existing-Home Sales on Tuesday October 13, the September Pending Home Sales Index on Tuesday October 20 and third-quarter Metro Home Prices on Thursday October 29, all at 10 a.m. Eastern under that schedule's own standing note. The United States Census Bureau published the Advance Economic Indicators Report for August on Wednesday September 30 at 8:30 Eastern, which covers international trade and retail and wholesale inventories and is not a housing release. The Federal Reserve held no meeting; its next is October 27 and 28. One scheduling note, because it corrects an assumption that is easy to carry. The two North American labour prints do not share a morning in October. Statistics Canada's September Labour Force Survey is scheduled for Friday October 9, read off the next-release line of the survey's own August edition rather than inferred from the calendar, so the Canadian print sits a week behind the first Friday of the month. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes its Employment Situation on the first Friday as a rule, which would put the September report on Friday October 2; that bureau's schedule page declined automated requests on Monday September 28, so treat the date as the rule rather than as a verified read and confirm it against the bureau. Neither is a housing release, but the Canadian one is the vintage the unemployment figure in the indicators strip above is keyed to. What is ahead and close. Freddie Mac's next weekly survey prints on Thursday October 1. August Construction Spending does not print on Wednesday September 30, and the September 28 reading of the Census Bureau's calendar recorded above had both the day and the time of it wrong. That calendar, re-read on Thursday October 1, schedules Construction Spending for August on Thursday October 1 at 10:00 Eastern, and the Bureau's own July edition of the same product, release number CB26-140 of September 1, states a 10:00 a.m. Eastern release time on its first line. The 8:30 Eastern slot belongs to New Residential Construction, which is a different Census product, and its September data are scheduled for Tuesday October 20. Statistics Canada has the September Consumer Price Index scheduled for Monday October 19, the same morning as the Bank of Canada's Business Outlook Survey, which puts one more inflation print in front of the October 28 announcement; investment in building construction for August is scheduled for October 21 and the New Housing Price Index for September for October 22. Decide on your own numbers rather than on the calendar. The Maple Syrup Money mortgage payment, affordability and stress-test, and rent-vs-buy calculators at maplesyrupmoney.com/tools/residential turn a 4.34% fixed or a 4.45% prime into a real monthly payment, and the commercial and investing calculators, cap rate, cash-on-cash, DSCR and the cash flow analyzer, at maplesyrupmoney.com/tools/commercial do the same for income property. Not financial advice. For educational purposes only.

Rate Watch, week of September 21 through September 27: the week opened on one Canadian construction print, turned on two American ones, and put the five-year Canadian benchmark at its highest close in sixteen months along the way. Sunday September 20 held nothing — The Daily publishes Monday through Friday, and no Canadian or American statistical agency had a release scheduled for that day. The Daily for Monday September 21 carried six releases, lettered a through f, and g returned a 404. They were: housing affordability in Canada for 2024, investment in building construction for July 2026, a study on income in the Canadian banking industry covering 2020 to 2025, urban public transit for July 2026, the Monthly Mineral Production Survey for July 2026, and the Monthly Energy Transportation and Storage Survey for July 2026. Two of the six touch this publication's subject. The first, the 2024 Canadian Housing Survey results on affordability, is carried in its own entry alongside this one and is the larger story of the two. The second is folded in here. Investment in building construction rose $270.9 million, or 1.2%, to $23.6 billion in July 2026, and was 8.1% above its July 2025 level. On a constant dollar basis with 2023 as the base year, the total reached $21.2 billion, up 1.0% from June and 4.7% from a year earlier. The composition is where a housing reader should stop. The non-residential sector rose 3.2% while the residential sector edged up just 0.3%, and inside residential the two halves moved in opposite directions: investment in single-family construction rose $265.2 million, or 3.5%, to $7.8 billion, while multi-unit construction fell $221.2 million, or 2.6%, to $8.4 billion. The single-family gain was widespread across every province, led by Ontario at $93.5 million and Alberta at $68.6 million. The multi-unit decline was concentrated in three provinces — British Columbia at $76.7 million, Quebec at $70.9 million and Ontario at $43.9 million. Those two components nearly cancelled, which is why the residential sector as a whole moved 0.3% while its parts moved 3.5% and -2.6%. Multi-unit construction was still the larger of the two in dollar terms in July, at $8.4 billion against $7.8 billion, but the gap narrowed over the month. Read this against CMHC's August housing starts and Statistics Canada's July building permits, both carried in the previous entry: a permit is an intention, a start is a shovel, and this series is the dollars actually spent putting the building up. Within non-residential, the institutional component led at 7.4%, followed by industrial at 2.8% and commercial at 0.8%; institutional investment rose $159.3 million to $2.3 billion, driven by new hospital construction in Ontario. Statistics Canada notes that this release revised unadjusted data back to 2021 and seasonally adjusted data back to 2018, and that table 34-10-0286 has been archived in favour of successor table 34-10-0293. The August edition is scheduled for October 21, 2026. The Daily for Tuesday September 22 carried seven releases, lettered a through g, and h returned a 404. They were: travel between Canada and other countries for July 2026, a study of opioid and stimulant consumption patterns in selected Canadian cities from January 2024 to March 2026, vehicle registrations for 2025, quarterly civil aviation statistics for the fourth quarter of 2025, the Wholesale Services Price Index for July 2026, the Retail Services Price Index for July 2026, and an interactive dashboard on employment insurance beneficiaries in rural and small town Canada for July 2026. Not one of the seven touches housing, mortgages or rates. That is a genuinely quiet day rather than an unread one, and the enumeration above is what makes the difference legible. The Daily for Wednesday September 23 carried seven releases, lettered a through g, and h returned a 404. They were: Canada's population estimates by age and gender for 2026, Canada's population estimates for the second quarter of 2026, Economic and Social Reports for September 2026, births for 2025, fertility and baby names for 2025, natural gas supply and disposition for July 2026, and refined petroleum products for August 2026. None of the seven is a housing, mortgage or rates release. One of them still counts the people who form households, which is where housing demand starts. Canada's population was estimated at 41,798,407 on July 1, 2026, up 0.2% from the previous quarter. The estimate of non-permanent residents fell 0.7% over the quarter to 2,779,774, and the quarterly flow of immigrants was 99,148 in the second quarter of 2026, down 4.2% from the second quarter of 2025. Both of the components that have driven Canadian population growth fastest in recent years were running slower in this estimate than a year earlier. Read that underneath the rental and resale numbers carried elsewhere in this month's coverage rather than instead of them. The Daily for Thursday September 24 carried seven releases, lettered a through g, and h returned a 404. They were: retail trade for July 2026, payroll employment, earnings and hours, and job vacancies for July 2026, aircraft movement and civil aviation statistics for July 2026, version 2.0 of the Open Database of Sports and Recreational Facilities, version 2.0 of the Open Database of Healthcare Facilities, oil and gas extraction for 2025, and the advance indicator of the Monthly Survey of Manufacturing for August 2026. None is a housing release, and one of them carries numbers from two sectors this publication follows. Average weekly earnings were $1,347.14 in July 2026, up 3.2% from July 2025, and payroll employment was up 171,900, or 0.9%, year over year. There were 501,000 job vacancies in July, a seventh consecutive month of little variation, and the job vacancy rate was 2.8%, unchanged from June and from July 2025. Two sectors inside that flat national total moved. Job vacancies in construction fell by 4,000, or 10.4%, and vacancies in real estate and rental and leasing fell by 1,500, or 20.9%. Payroll employment in real estate and rental and leasing rose by 2,300, or 0.8%, in the same month, so that sector had more people on payroll and fewer postings open. Retail sales, published the same morning, fell 0.7% to $73.7 billion in July, with Ontario down 2.0%. The two American releases that were still ahead when this entry was last written, on Tuesday September 22, both landed on Thursday September 24, and the first of the two was the larger of them by some distance. Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey for the week ending September 24 printed a 7.03% 30-year fixed rate, up 8 basis points from 6.95% the week before, and a 6.42% 15-year fixed, up 16 basis points from 6.26%. That was the first 30-year reading at or above 7% since the week ending January 16, 2025, when the survey printed 7.04%, and the first 15-year reading at or above 6.42% since the week ending May 2, 2024, when it printed 6.47%. Three weeks earlier, for the week ending September 3, the same survey had printed 6.71% and 6.04%, so the 30-year rose 32 basis points and the 15-year 38 basis points across three consecutive weekly prints. A 7% handle is a threshold rather than a mechanism, but it is the threshold most American borrowers price their decision against, and the survey had not put one in front of them in the twenty months before this print. The United States Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development published New Residential Sales for August 2026 at 10 a.m. Eastern the same morning, as release CB26-155. Sales of new single-family houses ran at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 684,000 in August, 6.4% above July's 643,000 rate and 2.0% below the 698,000 rate of August 2025. New houses for sale at the end of August were estimated at 483,000, virtually unchanged from July's 483,000 and 2.0% below August 2025's 493,000, which works out to 8.5 months of supply at the August sales rate, down from 9.0 months in July and level with August 2025. The median sales price of a new house sold in August was $393,700, 0.4% above July's $392,200 and 5.8% below the $417,900 of August 2025; the average price was $478,700, 9.1% below July's $526,400 and 8.8% below August 2025's $525,100. Read the error bars before the direction. The Census Bureau publishes a 90% confidence interval on every one of those monthly changes and they are wide — plus or minus 19.5 percentage points on the sales rate and plus or minus 7.4 on the median price — so the month-over-month moves are not statistically distinguishable from no change at all. The year-over-year price comparison is the firmer half of this release, and it says a new American house sold in August 2026 for 5.8% less at the median than one sold in August 2025 while the mortgage financing it cost more. The next edition, covering September, is scheduled for October 27, 2026. The previous entry closed with one reading outstanding: Friday September 18 had not been posted to the Bank of Canada's series when that entry was last updated on Saturday September 19. The Bank has since posted it. The five-year Government of Canada benchmark closed at 3.59% on Friday September 18, five basis points above the 3.54% close of Thursday September 17 and five basis points below the 3.64% close of Wednesday September 16. When the Bank's series was read on the morning of Tuesday September 22, Friday September 18 was the newest observation it carried; Monday September 21 had not been posted at that hour. The Bank ordinarily posts a session's close the following morning. Across the rest of the curve on that same Friday September 18 the two-year closed at 3.32% and the ten-year at 3.87%, against 3.27% and 3.83% on Thursday September 17. The Bank has since posted Monday September 21, Tuesday September 22 and Wednesday September 23. The five-year benchmark closed at 3.57% on Monday September 21 and at 3.54% on Tuesday September 22, so across the four sessions from Thursday September 17 to Tuesday September 22 it read 3.54%, 3.59%, 3.57% and 3.54% — a five-basis-point round trip that ended where it started, and eleven basis points below the 3.65% close of Monday September 14. Then it broke out of that range. The five-year benchmark closed at 3.69% on Wednesday September 23, fifteen basis points above Tuesday's 3.54% and the largest single-session move of the month. That had been the highest close of the third quarter, above the 3.65% readings of September 11, 14 and 15, and the highest close since Thursday May 30, 2024, when the series read 3.76% — sixteen months earlier. The rest of the curve moved with it: the two-year closed at 3.40% and the ten-year at 3.96% on that same Wednesday, against 3.25% and 3.83% on Tuesday September 22, so the shift was fifteen basis points at the two-year point, fifteen at the five-year and thirteen at the ten-year — a roughly parallel move up rather than a change in the curve's shape. When the Bank's series was read on the morning of Friday September 25, Wednesday September 23 was the newest observation it carried; Thursday September 24 and Friday September 25 had not been posted at that hour. What a borrower was quoted did not move with the curve through Monday September 21, and then moved sharply once the curve did. Ratehub's comparison table for five-year fixed mortgages carried a September 21, 2026, 5:19 p.m. update stamp, and its best available five-year fixed rate stood at 4.09% on that table — the same figure that stood on the September 15 table carried in the previous entry. The more useful detail sits beneath it. On the same page Ratehub listed its lowest two-year fixed rate at 3.89%, its lowest three-year at 3.94% and its lowest four-year at 4.09%, so on that table the two-year and three-year terms were priced below the five-year rather than above it, and the four-year matched it. A borrower renewing into that table was not being asked to pay a premium for a shorter commitment, which is the opposite of the usual shape and is worth checking against your own lender rather than assuming. Variable pricing did not move and structurally could not: prime has been 4.45% since the September 2 hold and cannot change before the Bank's next announcement on October 28. Fixed is priced off the Government of Canada curve and variable off the policy rate through prime — a distinction the numbers in the first half of this week make plainly, since the curve moved and prime did not. By Thursday September 24 the table itself had moved. Ratehub's comparison table for five-year fixed mortgages carried a September 24, 2026, 1:12 a.m. update stamp, and the lowest advertised five-year fixed rate on it was 4.34%, shown against a Big 6 bank and against an entry listed as a Canadian Lender — 25 basis points above the 4.09% that had stood on both the September 15 and the September 21 tables. The rungs beneath it moved with it: 4.44% from Alterna Savings, 4.49% from Meridian Credit Union and 4.59% from Scotiabank, against 4.24%, 4.29% and 4.51% on the September 15 table. Meridian's own entry rose 20 basis points over those nine days. When this entry first carried that comparison, on Thursday September 24, the newest close the Bank had posted was 3.54% on Tuesday September 22 — lower than the 3.65% of Monday September 14 — and the repricing read as a move the benchmark did not explain. The Bank has since posted Wednesday September 23 at 3.69%, the session immediately before the table moved, and that reframes it. Set each table against the benchmark close of its own stamp date: 4.09% against the 3.57% close of Monday September 21 is a spread of 52 basis points, and 4.34% against the 3.69% close of Wednesday September 23 is a spread of 65. So of the 25 basis points the advertised offer rose, 12 came from the benchmark and 13 from a wider spread — roughly half each, rather than none of it from the benchmark. The spread half is the lender's own decision and is not fixed, which is the practical reason a rate quoted to you last week is not a rate owed to you this week. Confirm the number with the lender, not with a comparison table. Set the two countries beside each other on the day they both printed. The lowest advertised Canadian five-year fixed rate on Thursday September 24 was 4.34% and Freddie Mac's American 30-year fixed for the week ending the same day was 7.03%, a spread of 269 basis points. Those are not the same instrument — a Canadian five-year fixed locks the rate for five years of a 25-year amortisation and has to be renewed four more times, while an American 30-year fixed locks it for the whole amortisation — so most of that gap is a difference in what is being bought rather than in what credit costs. What is comparable is direction, and over the two weeks to Thursday September 24 it pointed the same way in both countries: advertised fixed rates rose on both tables, and in Canada the government benchmark those rates are priced off rose with them, closing at 3.69% on Wednesday September 23 against 3.65% on Monday September 14. The Daily for Friday September 25 carried six releases, lettered a through f, and g returned a 404. They were: national tourism indicators for the second quarter of 2026, government finance statistics for the second quarter of 2026, screened passenger traffic at Canadian airports for August 2026, natural resource indicators for the second quarter of 2026, oilseed crushing statistics for August 2026, and the advance indicator of wholesale trade for August 2026. Not one of the six touches housing, mortgages or rates. That is a genuinely quiet close to the week rather than an unread one, and the enumeration above is what makes the difference legible. The rate table did not move on the Friday either, which is worth recording rather than leaving out. Ratehub's comparison table for five-year fixed mortgages, read on the morning of Friday September 25, carried a September 24, 2026, 9:04 p.m. update stamp — a later stamp than the 1:12 a.m. one above, with the same ladder underneath it. The lowest advertised five-year fixed rate was still 4.34%, shown against a Big 6 bank and against an entry listed as a Canadian Lender, with 4.44% from Alterna Savings, 4.49% from Meridian Credit Union and 4.59% from Scotiabank behind it. So the table was stamped twice on the Thursday — 1:12 a.m. and 9:04 p.m. — with the same five-year ladder at both, and it did not move again into the Friday. Prime was 4.45% on Friday September 25, unchanged since the September 2 hold, and cannot change before the Bank's next announcement on October 28. Saturday September 26 and Sunday September 27 both held nothing. The Daily publishes Monday through Friday, and no Canadian or American statistical agency had a release scheduled for either day. The rate table did not move across the weekend either. Ratehub's comparison table for five-year fixed mortgages, read on the morning of Monday September 28, carried a September 27, 2026, 5:19 p.m. update stamp — the last stamp of this week — and beneath it the same ladder that had stood on both of Thursday September 24's stamps: 4.34% shown against a Big 6 bank and against an entry listed as a Canadian Lender, then 4.44% from Alterna Savings, 4.49% from Meridian Credit Union and 4.59% from Scotiabank. So the 25-basis-point step up that arrived on the Thursday was the only move the five-year ladder made in this week, and it held through the Friday, the Saturday and the Sunday. Prime was 4.45% on Sunday September 27, unchanged since the September 2 hold, and cannot change before the Bank's next announcement on October 28. Diffing this week against every source this publication scans, in both directions: three of them published inside September 20 through September 27. Statistics Canada published on every business day, enumerated above. Freddie Mac published its weekly survey on Thursday September 24. The United States Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development published New Residential Sales for August on the same morning. The Bank of Canada held no announcement and published no Summary of Deliberations, and its published calendar of upcoming events, read again on Friday September 25, listed nothing upcoming before a September 29 fireside chat; its next interest rate announcement, with a Monetary Policy Report, is October 28, and its Business Outlook Survey and Canadian Survey of Consumer Expectations are scheduled for 11:30 Eastern on Monday October 19. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation's August housing starts printed on September 16 and are carried in the previous entry; its September edition had not printed as of Friday September 25, when both of the slug shapes that corporation has used this year returned a 404. The Canadian Real Estate Association's next statistics package is scheduled for Friday October 16, 2026, so August stands as the latest national resale month until then. Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey prints Thursdays only; its week-ending-September-17 print of a 6.95% 30-year fixed and a 6.26% 15-year fixed is carried in the previous entry, and its week-ending-September-24 print is carried above. The Federal Reserve held no meeting in this window; its September 15-16 statement and Summary of Economic Projections are carried in the previous entry and its next meeting is October 27-28. The National Association of Realtors published nothing in this window and publishes nothing further this month — its August Pending Home Sales report printed September 17 and is carried in the previous entry, and its next release is September Existing-Home Sales on Tuesday October 13, followed by the September Pending Home Sales Index on Tuesday October 20 and third-quarter Metro Home Prices on Thursday October 29. The United States Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development published August New Residential Construction on September 17, carried in the previous entry, and their next edition of that release, covering September, is scheduled for Tuesday October 20. The only Census release inside Friday September 25 was the advance report on durable goods at 8:30 a.m. Eastern, which is not a housing release. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the Employment Situation on the first Friday of the month and had nothing scheduled in this window. What is ahead and close. Freddie Mac's next weekly survey prints on Thursday October 1. The Census Bureau's next New Residential Sales edition, covering September, is scheduled for October 27, 2026. Statistics Canada has scheduled investment in building construction for August for October 21, the New Housing Price Index for September for October 22, and the Consumer Price Index for September for Monday October 19, which puts one more inflation print in front of the Bank's October 28 announcement — the same morning the Bank publishes its Business Outlook Survey. Decide on your own numbers rather than on the calendar. The Maple Syrup Money mortgage payment, affordability and stress-test, and rent-vs-buy calculators at maplesyrupmoney.com/tools/residential turn a 4.34% fixed or a 4.45% prime into a real monthly payment, and the commercial and investing calculators — cap rate, cash-on-cash, DSCR and the cash flow analyzer — at maplesyrupmoney.com/tools/commercial do the same for income property. Not financial advice. For educational purposes only.

Statistics Canada published results from the 2024 Canadian Housing Survey on Monday September 21, and the finding that matters most to anyone carrying a mortgage is not the headline number but which group moved it. In 2024, 23.2% of Canadian households lived in housing that was unaffordable to them — defined as spending 30% or more of household income on shelter costs — up from 22.0% in 2022. Renters remained far more exposed than owners, at 33.7% against 17.4%, and that gap has been stable since 2018, the first cycle of the survey. But the increase between 2022 and 2024 did not come from renters. Among homeowners with a mortgage, 26.1% lived in unaffordable housing in 2024, up from 23.6% in 2022, and Statistics Canada attributes the overall rise to that group specifically: renters in market rental units saw no change in their unaffordability rate over the same two years. The survey is run as a collaboration between Statistics Canada and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, and it sampled households across the ten provinces. It found that 36.6% of Canadian households were homeowners with a mortgage in 2024, 27.8% were homeowners without one, and 31.3% were renters in the private market. The survey also asked households how the cost felt, which is a different question from what the shelter-cost-to-income ratio measures, and the answers moved further than the ratios did. In 2024, 27.9% of households reported financial difficulty over the previous twelve months because rent or mortgage payments had gone up, against 22.6% in 2022. Dissatisfaction with affordability reached 23.3% of households, up 8.8 percentage points from 14.5% in 2022 and more than double the 11.1% recorded in 2018. Homeowners with a mortgage reported the sharpest increase of any group, rising to 28.2% — close to the 28.9% reported by renters in market rental housing, a group that had historically reported much higher dissatisfaction than owners. More than one in three mortgage holders, 36.2%, reported financial difficulty specifically because of increased mortgage payments, up 7.9 percentage points from 28.3% in 2022. Statistics Canada attaches a note to that figure that explains the mechanism: fixed-rate mortgages coming up for renewal in 2025 had originally been locked in when the Bank of Canada's policy rate was at or below 1%, and the agency says higher rates may continue to affect how mortgage holders perceive affordability. That is the renewal wall this publication has covered from the rate side, measured for once from the household side. First-time buyers are the sharpest version of the same finding. In 2024, 10.6% of Canadian households — 1.74 million of them — had bought their first home during the five years from 2019 through 2023, up from 8.7%, or 1.28 million households, in 2018. More Canadians became owners, in other words, over a stretch in which mortgage lending rates had fallen and the Canadian Real Estate Association was reporting record sales. What happened to that cohort afterwards is the story. The share of recent first-time buyers living in unaffordable housing rose from 24.9% in 2018 to 27.4% in 2024. The share reporting difficulty from increased mortgage payments reached 34.1%, more than double the 16.4% reported by the equivalent 2018 cohort. And 33.1% of 2024 first-time buyers said they were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with their housing affordability, against 13.4% in 2018 — a rate that did not rise so much as change category. Buying the home was the part that worked; carrying it through a repricing was not. On the rental side the survey separated two groups that a single average rent hides completely. Renters in the private market who had moved within the previous two years paid an average of $1,740 a month in 2024. Renters who had been in the same dwelling for two years or more — sitting tenants — paid $1,290. That is a $450 monthly difference for the same market, and it tracks straight through to every other measure: 40.0% of recent movers lived in unaffordable housing against 32.2% of sitting tenants, 44.5% reported financial difficulty from rent increases against 33.5%, and 45.5% were dissatisfied with affordability against 24.4%. Since 2018 the share reporting difficulty because of rent increases rose 27.0 percentage points for recent movers and 16.5 percentage points for sitting tenants, so the gap between moving and staying has widened rather than held. For a newcomer to Canada, who is a recent mover by definition and has no sitting-tenant history to fall back on, the $1,740 figure is the relevant one and the $1,290 figure is not available at any price. The survey also distinguished purpose-built rental housing — the primary rental market — from the secondary market of individually rented condominiums and houses for the first time, and found that 45.6% of private market renters lived in the primary market in 2024. Non-market housing did not absorb the pressure. In 2024, 690,500 households, or 4.2% of all households, lived in social and affordable housing, up from 621,400 households and 4.0% in 2022. Waitlists grew with it: 301,000 households had at least one member on a social and affordable housing waitlist, against 245,900 in 2022, and more than half of them — 59.2% — had been waiting two years or more. Median household income in social and affordable housing was $30,270, and 51.5% of those households said it was difficult or very difficult to meet their financial needs. Even inside subsidised housing, 31.7% still spent 30% or more of income on shelter, up 6.3 percentage points from 25.4% in 2022. Read this release against the flow figures carried elsewhere in this month's coverage rather than instead of them. The resale and starts numbers describe what is being transacted and built; this survey describes what households are already carrying, and it is the only one of the three that asks them. The two point the same way. If you are deciding whether a payment is one you can carry rather than one you can qualify for, the Maple Syrup Money affordability and stress-test calculators and the rent-vs-buy calculator at maplesyrupmoney.com/tools/residential will put your own numbers against the 30% threshold this survey measures. Not financial advice. For educational purposes only.

Rate Watch, week of September 14 through September 19: the week opened on Statistics Canada's Consumer Price Index for August, published Monday September 14, and on the Canadian Real Estate Association's national resale package for August, published Tuesday September 15. Both are carried in their own entries alongside this one. Headline inflation held at 3.0% while mortgage interest cost sat 0.2% below its year-earlier level and rent accelerated to 2.8%; national home sales fell 0.7% month over month while the composite price index was unchanged for a fourth straight month. This entry carries the rest of the week: what each day's Daily actually held, what CMHC's August housing starts showed, what Statistics Canada's New Housing Price Index did to new-build prices, what the United States Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development reported on American permits, starts and completions, what American builders told the National Association of Home Builders, what the National Association of Realtors reported on August contract signings, where Freddie Mac's weekly mortgage survey landed for the week ending September 17, where the Government of Canada curve closed, what the two central banks did when they reported on the afternoon of Wednesday September 16, and what Statistics Canada's monthly credit aggregates showed about the mortgage debt Canadian households already carry. The Daily for Tuesday September 15 carried three releases — job vacancies for the second quarter, wholesale trade for July, and new motor vehicle sales for July — and not one of the three touched housing, mortgages or rates. The Daily for Wednesday September 16 carried eight, lettered a through h, which is a heavy day by this month's standards: building permits for July, model-based principal field crop estimates for August, Health Reports for September, employer pension plans for the first quarter, tuition fees for degree programs for 2026/2027, telecommunications services producer price indexes for the second quarter, and interactive dashboards on business counts and on business conditions in rural and small town Canada. Only the first of those eight is a housing print, and it is the week's third — though it was not the day's only one, because CMHC published separately the same morning and the National Association of Home Builders published on the American side later that morning. Building permits are where the construction pipeline shows up before the houses do, and July's reading fell hard. The total value of permits issued in Canada declined $2.6 billion, or 17.3%, to $12.2 billion, more than offsetting the $2.3 billion gain recorded in June. Most of that was non-residential, down $1.9 billion to $5.0 billion, led by a $1.5 billion drop in the institutional component with Ontario alone accounting for $1.1 billion of it. Residential construction intentions fell $701.2 million to $7.2 billion. The multi-unit component accounted for most of the residential decline, down $531.8 million to $4.7 billion, against a $169.4 million decline to $2.5 billion on the single-family side; British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec led the multi-unit drop and nine provinces and two territories contributed to it. In unit terms, 19,200 multi-unit dwellings and 4,100 single-family dwellings were authorized across Canada in July, a 10.1% decrease from the previous month. The twelve months to July 2026 authorized 297,100 multi-unit dwellings in total, down from 308,200 in the twelve months before that. On a constant dollar basis the July total was 17.5% below June and 2.2% below July 2025. A permit is an intention rather than a start, so this is a statement about what builders filed in July and not about what gets completed — but a construction pipeline narrowing while resale listings rise is the tension sitting underneath CREA's August package. Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation answered the other half of that distinction the same morning. CMHC published its August housing starts and construction data on Wednesday September 16, and where permits fell hard in July, starts did not. The total monthly seasonally adjusted annual rate of housing starts for all areas in Canada was flat in August at 229,046 units, against 229,360 units in July. The six-month trend measure, which CMHC reports alongside the monthly rate because a single month of starts is volatile, was down 1.3% in August compared with July, to 244,149 units from 247,446. Actual monthly starts in centres with a population of 10,000 or more were 17,691 units in August against 18,112 units in August 2025, down 2% year over year, and the year-to-date total stood at 149,542 units, down 4% from the same period in 2025. Kevin Hughes, CMHC's Deputy Chief Economist, said housing starts continued to trend slightly down in August, as modest gains in Quebec and Alberta only partially offset the decline in other provinces, most notably Ontario. Three further figures in that release speak directly to the permits number above it. The number of units under construction in centres with a population of 50,000 or more was essentially flat in August, down 0.4% month over month to 371,658 units. Completions fell 11.2% from July, with construction finishing on 17,550 units. And the count of units that hold an approved building permit but have not yet been started rose 0.7% month over month, to 142,423 units in August. That last figure is the one to hold beside Statistics Canada's July permits decline: fewer new intentions were filed in July, while the backlog of already-approved but not-yet-started units grew slightly through August. The pipeline narrowed at the front end without emptying in the middle. The rural starts monthly SAAR estimate was 11,224 units. The Daily for Thursday September 17 carried five releases, lettered a through e: Canada's international transactions in securities for July, the industrial product and raw materials price indexes for August, Employment Insurance for July, the New Housing Price Index for August, and the Fertilizer Shipments Survey for the third and fourth quarters of 2025/2026. The fourth of those is that Thursday's Canadian housing print, and it is a different statistic from the CREA resale composite carried in its own entry this week. The New Housing Price Index measures the selling price of a new house as agreed between the contractor and the buyer at the moment the contract is signed, net of GST and HST, holding the specification of the house constant between periods; CREA's composite tracks what already-built homes change hands for on resale. In August the national index edged down 0.1% from July. Nova Scotia fell 0.2%, and Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia each fell 0.1%. Manitoba was the only province to rise, at 0.2%, and Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Quebec and Saskatchewan were all unchanged. Statistics Canada reports the index on a December 2016=100 base from table 18-10-0205-01, does not seasonally adjust it, and does not revise it, so a 0.1% national decline is a small move that will not be restated later. The September index is scheduled for October 22. The American counterpart to the Canadian permits and starts figures above landed the same morning. The United States Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development jointly published New Residential Construction for August 2026, release number CB26-147, at 8:30 a.m. Eastern on Thursday September 17. Building permits ran at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,394,000, which is 2.7% below the revised July rate of 1,433,000 and 3.5% above the August 2025 rate of 1,347,000; single-family authorizations were 878,000, 1.8% below the revised July figure of 894,000, and authorizations in buildings with five units or more were 467,000. Housing starts ran at 1,275,000, which the Bureau reports as 2.6% (plus or minus 12.0%) below the revised July estimate of 1,309,000 and 1.2% (plus or minus 10.8%) below the August 2025 rate of 1,291,000; single-family starts were 918,000, or 7.6% (plus or minus 14.0%) above the revised July figure of 853,000, and the five-or-more rate was 344,000. Housing completions ran at 1,128,000, which is 11.9% (plus or minus 9.7%) below the revised July estimate of 1,280,000 and 27.1% (plus or minus 8.9%) below the August 2025 rate of 1,548,000; single-family completions were 816,000, 10.4% (plus or minus 9.3%) below the revised July rate of 911,000, and the five-or-more rate was 302,000. Those ranges are the Bureau's own 90% confidence intervals and they decide which of these numbers is a move. Every change on the permits and starts lines is smaller than its own interval, including the 7.6% single-family starts increase, so the Bureau's standard reading is that it cannot tell from this month's sample whether starts rose or fell at all. The completions lines are the exception: 11.9% month over month, 27.1% year over year and 10.4% on single-family completions each exceed their interval, so the completions decline is the one part of the American August release that the data can carry on its own. The Bureau's next release, covering September, is scheduled for October 20, 2026. Held beside the Canadian half of this entry, the finishing end of the pipeline is where both countries moved in the same direction in August: CMHC recorded completions on 17,550 units in Canada, down 11.2% from July, while American completions fell 11.9% from July and 27.1% from a year earlier. Fewer homes were handed over on both sides of the border in the same month. On the Canadian rates side the benchmark closed at one level three sessions running — the last session of the previous week and the first two of this one — and gave no new direction. The five-year Government of Canada benchmark closed at 3.65% on Friday September 11, at 3.65% again on Monday September 14, and at 3.65% a third time on Tuesday September 15. When this entry was updated on the morning of Thursday September 17, the Bank's published series still ended at that Tuesday September 15 close, with neither Wednesday September 16 nor Thursday September 17 posted to it at that point. By the afternoon of Thursday September 17 the Bank had posted the Wednesday September 16 session, and this entry was updated again to carry it: the five-year Government of Canada benchmark closed at 3.64% on Wednesday September 16, a basis point below the three closes that ran ahead of it. Thursday September 17 was still not posted to the series when that afternoon check was made, so the Wednesday September 16 close was the newest reading the Bank had published at that hour. By the time this entry was updated on Saturday September 19 the Bank had posted that session too, and it moved: the five-year Government of Canada benchmark closed at 3.54% on Thursday September 17, ten basis points below the 3.64% close of Wednesday September 16 and eleven basis points below the three 3.65% closes that ran ahead of both. That was the session immediately after the Federal Open Market Committee's Wednesday September 16 decision, which is set out further down this entry. Friday September 18 had not been posted to the Bank's series when this entry was updated on Saturday September 19, so the Thursday September 17 close was the newest reading the Bank had published at that point. The three 3.65% closes of Friday September 11, Monday September 14 and Tuesday September 15 had been the highest readings the benchmark posted in the third quarter as of the Thursday September 17 close, 23 basis points above the 3.42% close of September 2 and 66 basis points above the 2.99% close of June 24, and neither the Wednesday September 16 session nor the Thursday September 17 session passed them. The Thursday September 17 close was 12 basis points above that September 2 close and 55 basis points above the June 24 close. The prices a borrower is quoted moved underneath a top rung that did not. Ratehub's best available insured five-year fixed rate was 4.09% on a table carrying a September 15, 2026, 6:11 p.m. update stamp, the same figure that stood on Sunday September 13, but the four rungs beneath it had shifted up or changed hands: 4.14% from Alterna Savings, 4.24% from a Big 6 bank, 4.29% from Meridian Credit Union and 4.51% from Bank of Montreal. In the week of September 7 a Big 6 bank and Simplii Financial had shared the 4.09% rung with nothing between it and Alterna's 4.14%; by September 15 the 4.09% rung held a single Canadian lender, the Big 6 entry had moved 15 basis points higher, and Simplii had dropped out of the five lowest rates the table showed. A lowest advertised rate that holds while the ladder under it widens is a narrowing of who can actually reach it. Re-checked when this entry was updated on Saturday September 19, that lowest advertised insured five-year fixed rate was still 4.09%, on a table then carrying a September 18, 2026, 2:28 p.m. update stamp. It had not moved with the benchmark it is priced off, which had fallen 11 basis points over the Wednesday September 16 and Thursday September 17 sessions, from the 3.65% it had closed at on each of the three sessions before them. A fixed rate quoted to a borrower follows the bond market through a lender's margin and with a lag, not tick for tick. The American side of the week opened on the builders. The National Association of Home Builders and Wells Fargo published their Housing Market Index for September on Wednesday September 16, and builder confidence in the market for newly built single-family homes fell three points to 32. The survey's three component indices moved with it: current sales conditions fell four points to 35, sales expectations for the next six months dropped six points to 37, and traffic of prospective buyers held steady at 23. The index is a diffusion measure in which any reading below 50 means more builders call conditions poor than call them good, so a 32 describes a market that the people building into it read as weak rather than merely slowing. What those builders are doing about it sits in the same survey: 38% cut prices in September, up from 35% in August, while the average price cut held at 6% for a sixth consecutive month, and 66% reported using sales incentives, up from 63% in August and, on NAHB's own comparison, the highest share since the 67% posted in December. Read against the Canadian half of this entry, the two sides of the border are straining at different points of the same pipeline: Canadian residential construction intentions fell $701.2 million in July, before anything is built, while American builders are discounting the homes they are already trying to sell. That survey also sits against the Census starts line published the following morning, where single-family starts were reported 7.6% above July inside a plus-or-minus 14.0% interval — builders breaking more ground than the month before is not a reading that release can support, and it is not what the builders themselves described. The American rate half was still ahead on the morning of Wednesday September 16. Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey publishes on Thursdays, so its most recent print through Wednesday September 16 remained the week ending September 10: a 6.76% 30-year fixed and a 6.09% 15-year fixed, a third consecutive weekly increase on the 30-year after 6.65% for the week ending August 20, 6.66% for the week ending August 27 and 6.71% for the week ending September 3. That next survey covered the week ending September 17 and printed that same Thursday. When this entry was updated on the morning of Thursday September 17, the last row of Freddie Mac's own rate history file was still the week ending September 10, so whether the American back-up ran to a fourth week was still open at that hour. It had by the afternoon, and by more than the three weeks before it. Freddie Mac's rate history file carried a week-ending-September-17 row when this entry was updated again on the afternoon of Thursday September 17: a 6.95% 30-year fixed and a 6.26% 15-year fixed. The 30-year's 6.95% was up 19 basis points from the 6.76% of the week ending September 10, and the 15-year's 6.26% was up 17 basis points from the 6.09% of that same week. That is a fourth consecutive weekly increase on the 30-year, and it is by a wide margin the largest step in the run: a basis point, then five, then five, and then nineteen. It printed the morning after the Federal Open Market Committee raised its target range, which is the piece of this week that reaches an American borrower fastest. The mechanism is still the long end of the Treasury curve rather than the funds rate itself, and the long end moved. The second American print that was still ahead that morning had landed by the time of that same afternoon check. The National Association of Realtors published its Pending Home Sales report for August on Thursday September 17: contract signings rose 0.3% month over month and fell 4.7% year over year. The month-over-month gain was regional rather than general — the South rose 2.3% and the West rose 3.0%, while the Northeast fell 4.2% and the Midwest fell 1.6% — and all four regions sat below their year-earlier levels, the Northeast by 3.9%, the Midwest by 4.9%, the South by 3.8% and the West by 6.7%. The release states those moves as percentages and publishes no index level for August, so none is carried here. Lawrence Yun, NAR's Chief Economist, said buyers steadily entered into contracts in August even though mortgage rates increased, that the housing market is still sluggish with contract signings below last year, and that higher mortgage rates are offsetting the buying power created by job gains and by income growth outpacing home price growth. He attributed the two regional declines to price rather than to rates: the Northeast and the Midwest saw the fastest home price growth in August, which he said is part of the reason those same two regions posted the steepest declines in contract signings. He also set the national figure in a longer frame, saying contract signings are running roughly 30% below where they were in the years leading up to the pandemic, and that transaction activity peaked in 2021 when mortgage rates fell to a historic low near 3% and has not approached that level since. A pending sale is a signed contract rather than a closing, which is what makes this the leading edge of the same American pipeline whose completions fell 11.9% in the Census release published earlier that same day: contracts signed in August roughly flat against July, homes actually handed over sharply fewer. Both central banks reported on Wednesday September 16, and between them they are the largest thing in this week. The Bank of Canada published the Summary of Deliberations for its September 2 decision at 13:30 Eastern. With no Monetary Policy Report attached to a September decision, that summary was the only window into how divided Governing Council had been between its warning that upside risks to inflation have increased and its acknowledgement that new tariffs make growth less certain — the split that had put National Bank and Scotiabank on a coming hike while the other four of the Big Six held at 2.25% through December when this week opened. The document answers that question, and the answer is that the division was about the analysis rather than about the decision. Members agreed the policy rate should remain unchanged at 2.25%, and they agreed that the risks to inflation from persistently high energy prices had increased, with no indications that the war in the Middle East was nearing a resolution. Where they differed was on what the tariffs would do to that risk: the summary records that members shared a range of views on how new US tariffs would affect growth, and on whether the resulting weakness in the economy would contain the pass-through of higher energy prices. New US tariffs had been imposed on roughly 5% of Canadian goods exports to the United States, and the direct effect on the overall economy was expected to be modest, but members agreed that the breakdown in trade negotiations, the new tariffs and the threat of further measures had made growth prospects more uncertain. On the inflation side the summary restates the September 2 arithmetic — CPI hovering around 3% for several months, CPI excluding gasoline at 2.2%, core measures around 2%, and little evidence at that point that higher gasoline prices were passing through broadly to the prices of other goods and services — and then adds the conditional that matters for anyone holding a variable rate: if higher energy prices did spill over into other components of the CPI, that could require a monetary policy response to prevent broad-based inflation from setting in. Second-quarter GDP growth of 3.3% came in slightly above expectations, while the labour market was still soft, with the unemployment rate around 6.5% and subdued wage growth, leaving an economy Governing Council read as still in excess supply. What the Council said it would watch before the October decision is narrow: whether the recovery is sustained in the face of an escalation of US tariffs, and whether energy inflation passes through to other goods and services. The forecast panel behind that split had itself moved by Wednesday September 16: Canadian Mortgage Trends had the Big Six largely aligned on a hold at 2.25% through the rest of 2026, with Scotiabank, National Bank, RBC and CIBC all expecting the Bank’s next move to be an increase rather than a cut — Scotiabank earliest, at 2.75% in the fourth quarter of 2026 and 3.00% in early 2027, and National Bank at 2.50% in the first quarter of 2027. The Federal Open Market Committee announced its decision on Wednesday September 16, concluding the two-day meeting it began Tuesday September 15, and it moved. It raised the target range for the federal funds rate by a quarter point, to 3.75% to 4.00%, on a 12–0 vote with no dissents, saying the action would support a timelier return to its 2% goal. The statement describes an economy expanding at a solid pace, with resilient domestic spending, strong productivity growth, job gains keeping pace with the workforce and an unemployment rate that has changed little, set against inflation that remains elevated. The Board of Governors set the interest rate paid on reserve balances at 3.90% and the primary credit rate at 4.00%, both effective Thursday September 17. The Summary of Economic Projections attached to the meeting is the half a mortgage reader should read, because it moved further than the decision did. The median participant put the federal funds rate at 4.1% at the end of 2026, against 3.8% in the June projections; at 4.1% at the end of 2027, against 3.6%; and at 3.9% at the end of 2028, against 3.4%. The longer-run median edged up to 3.2% from 3.1%. Those medians describe one further quarter-point increase before the end of this year and no reduction at all through 2027, which is a materially higher path than the same participants published in June. The inflation medians moved with them, to 3.7% for PCE inflation in 2026 from 3.6% and to 3.4% for core PCE from 3.3%, while the 2026 unemployment median fell to 4.1% from 4.3% and real GDP growth for 2026 rose to 2.3% from 2.2%. Neither outcome moves a Canadian fixed rate directly. Fixed is priced off the Government of Canada curve; only variable rates and lines of credit track the overnight rate, through prime, and prime has been 4.45% since the September 2 hold and cannot move again before the Bank's October 28 announcement. The American mechanism has the same shape: the 30-year fixed follows the Treasury curve rather than the funds rate, so what reaches an American borrower from the Wednesday September 16 decision arrives through what that projected path does to the long end, and not through the target range itself. The last two days this entry covers, Friday September 18 and Saturday September 19, added one Canadian print between them and nothing else. The Daily for Friday September 18 carried two releases, lettered a and b: the Survey of Household Spending for 2023, and the monthly credit aggregates for July 2026. The first does not touch housing, mortgages or rates. The second does, and it is the higher-frequency read on the story the second-quarter national balance sheet told earlier this month in its own entry. Statistics Canada's monthly credit aggregates estimate the stock of debt households have outstanding at the end of each month, seasonally adjusted, across every lending sector — chartered banks, credit unions, non-bank lenders, governments and securitization vehicles together. Residential mortgage debt outstanding stood at $2,443.4 billion at the end of July 2026, up $6.6 billion from the end of June. That is 4.1% above the $2,348.1 billion outstanding at the end of July 2025, against 4.0% growth in the twelve months to June 2026 and 4.8% in the twelve months to July 2025. Twelve-month growth in residential mortgage debt had run at 5.0% in the year to October 2025 and fell in every month but one between then and July 2026, and the monthly increases behind it narrowed with it: $6.6 billion in July 2026 and $7.4 billion in June, against $11.6 billion in August 2025 and $12.2 billion in October 2025. Non-mortgage household debt was $835.5 billion at the end of July and total household credit liabilities were $3,287.0 billion, so residential mortgages were roughly three-quarters of what Canadian households owed. The quarterly reading carried in this month's national balance sheet entry — $19.4 billion of new mortgage borrowing in the second quarter, the slowest pace since the first quarter of 2024 — and this monthly series point the same way, and they are not the same measurement: the quarterly figure is a flow of new borrowing over three months, the monthly series a stock of debt outstanding at a month end. Read them together rather than against each other. This release also revised January 2025 through June 2026, so the figures above are not the ones a reader would have computed from the previous edition, and the August edition is scheduled for October 20, 2026. Saturday September 19 carried nothing. The Daily publishes Monday through Friday, and no Canadian or American statistical agency had a release scheduled for that day. What remains on the calendar is short. The United States Census Bureau's New Residential Construction release for August printed on Thursday September 17 and is carried above; its next edition, covering September, is scheduled for October 20, 2026. The two American prints that were still ahead when this entry was updated on the morning of Thursday September 17 — the National Association of Realtors' Pending Home Sales report for August and Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey for the week ending September 17 — both landed later that same day, and both are carried above. Statistics Canada has scheduled the New Housing Price Index for September for October 22. The Canadian Real Estate Association has scheduled its next statistics package for Friday October 16, 2026, so August stands as the latest national resale month until then. Statistics Canada has scheduled the Consumer Price Index for September for Monday October 19, which puts one more inflation print in front of the Bank's October 28 announcement. Decide on your own numbers rather than on the calendar. The Maple Syrup Money mortgage payment, affordability and stress-test, and rent-vs-buy calculators at maplesyrupmoney.com/tools/residential turn a 4.09% fixed or a 4.45% prime into a real monthly payment, and the commercial and investing calculators (cap rate, cash-on-cash, DSCR, cash flow analyzer) at maplesyrupmoney.com/tools/commercial do the same for income property. Not financial advice. For educational purposes only.

The Canadian Real Estate Association published its national resale package for August 2026 on Tuesday September 15, and the number that matters is how little moved. Home sales recorded over Canadian MLS Systems fell 0.7% month over month in August, leaving monthly activity largely unchanged since May. On an actual, not seasonally adjusted basis, August activity was 6.9% below August 2025. The National Composite MLS Home Price Index was unchanged from July to August, a fourth consecutive month of essentially flat prices, which CREA describes as the longest stretch of price stability since 2024, when prices were flat throughout the year. Measured against August 2025 the same index was down 3.0%, and CREA notes that year-over-year declines have been shrinking since January, making the August reading the smallest annual decrease since October 2025. The actual, not seasonally adjusted national average sale price was $668,219 in August 2026, up 0.6% from the same month a year earlier. What did move was supply. Newly listed properties climbed 3.3% month over month, reversing three straight declines earlier in the summer. CREA Chair Garry Bhaura attributed the increase to sellers looking to get an early start on the fall market, calling it broad based across all the largest markets and most apparent towards the end of the month, particularly given how late Labour Day fell this year. The extra supply against slightly weaker sales pushed the national sales-to-new-listings ratio down to 49.1% from 51.1% in July, against a long-term average of 54.7%. CREA treats readings roughly between 45% and 65% as consistent with balanced conditions, so at 49.1% the ratio moved within the balanced band rather than out of it. Just under 200,000 properties were listed for sale on all Canadian MLS Systems at the end of August, in line with the historical average for that time of year and 1.4% above the year-earlier level. There were 4.8 months of inventory on a national basis, unchanged for a fourth consecutive month and slightly below the long-term average of five months for that measure; on CREA's own definition a seller's market would be below 3.6 months and a buyer's market above 6.4 months. The part of the release a borrower should read twice is the explanation attached to it. CREA Senior Economist Shaun Cathcart said sales activity and price trends were largely unchanged for a fourth consecutive month in August, and that what has changed is the broader economic environment, with the Bank of Canada recently warning of rising inflation risks alongside doubts about the durability of recent economic growth. He then separated the two mortgage channels explicitly: fixed mortgage rates have already increased on higher bond yields, while on the variable side a rate hike is not only back on the table for this year but already priced in by markets. That is the same split this month's earlier entries describe, stated here by the association that counts the transactions. The bond-market half of it is measurable. The five-year Government of Canada benchmark closed at 3.65% on Friday September 11 and at 3.65% again on Monday September 14, and those two closes had been the highest readings the benchmark posted in the third quarter as of Monday September 14, 23 basis points above the 3.42% close of September 2, the day of the Bank's decision, and 66 basis points above the 2.99% close of June 24. Canadian fixed mortgage rates are priced off that curve rather than off the overnight rate, which is what makes Cathcart's first clause a statement about the bond market rather than about the Bank. Ratehub's best available insured five-year fixed rate, on a table carrying a September 15, 2026, 6:11 p.m. update stamp, was still 4.09%, but the ladder under it had loosened since the previous week: 4.09% from a Canadian lender, then 4.14% from Alterna Savings, 4.24% from a Big 6 bank, 4.29% from Meridian Credit Union and 4.51% from Bank of Montreal. In the week of September 7 a Big 6 bank and Simplii Financial had shared the 4.09% rung; on September 15 the Big 6 entry sat 15 basis points higher and Simplii was no longer among the five lowest rates the table showed. A lowest advertised rate that holds while the rungs beneath it widen is a narrowing of who can actually reach it. Cathcart's closing line is the forward-looking one: this fresh round of incoming headwinds is expected to dampen the prospects for further housing market momentum heading into 2027. Read beside RBC's September 1 forecast update, which has resales rising every month since April and prices flat across most of the country but still closes 2026 down 3.6% at 453,200 units before a 6.7% rebound in 2027, the two readings agree on the present and differ on how much of that rebound survives higher fixed rates. CREA has scheduled its next statistics package for Friday October 16, 2026, which puts the September resale numbers in front of the Bank of Canada's October 28 announcement. Decide on your own numbers rather than on the national average. The Maple Syrup Money mortgage payment, affordability and stress-test, and rent-vs-buy calculators at maplesyrupmoney.com/tools/residential turn a 4.09% fixed or a 4.45% prime into a real monthly payment, and the commercial and investing calculators (cap rate, cash-on-cash, DSCR, cash flow analyzer) at maplesyrupmoney.com/tools/commercial do the same for income property. Not financial advice. For educational purposes only.

Statistics Canada published the Consumer Price Index for August 2026 on Monday September 14, and the housing lines inside it run the opposite way to the headline. All-items inflation was 3.0% year over year in August, matching July's 3.0% and sitting at the top of the Bank of Canada's 1% to 3% control range. Shelter, the largest single component of the basket, rose 1.5% over the same twelve months — half the national rate — and 0.3% from July to August. Inside shelter the owner side and the renter side separate. Owned accommodation rose 0.5% year over year. Mortgage interest cost, the line that measures what Canadian households pay to service the mortgages they already hold, was 0.2% lower in August than a year earlier, and it sat below its year-earlier level in each of June, July and August, by 0.3%, 0.3% and 0.2% respectively. That same index rose 30.9% year over year in August 2023, so what the August 2026 reading records is the 2022 and 2023 rate shock finishing its passage out of the twelve-month window rather than any fresh relief. Homeowners' replacement cost, which tracks the price of new homes, was 1.9% lower than a year earlier. Pulling the other way inside the same component, property taxes and other special charges rose 5.6% and homeowners' home and mortgage insurance rose 4.3%. Renters got the other half of the trade. Rent rose 2.8% year over year in August after a 2.5% increase in July, and Statistics Canada attributes that acceleration to Manitoba, where rent rose 4.3%, and Ontario, where it rose 2.4%. Read beside the Quarterly Rent Statistics carried in this month's September 9 entry — average asking rent for a two-bedroom apartment across all census metropolitan areas at $2,130 a month, down 3.6% year over year — the two series are measuring different things and are not in conflict: asking rent is what a unit is newly listed at, while the Consumer Price Index rent series tracks what sitting tenants are billed, including renewals. Asking rents can fall nationally while the rent an average household actually pays keeps climbing. What held the headline at 3.0% was not housing. Gasoline was 22.8% higher than a year earlier, after 25.7% in July, and transportation as a whole rose 7.5%. Travel tours rose 26.1% year over year after 15.2% in July, which Statistics Canada attributes partly to a base-year effect from the sharp 2025 decline in Canadian travel to the United States, together with fuel surcharges. Excluding gasoline the index rose 2.4% in August after 2.2% in July, so the underlying pace firmed even as the headline stood still. On a monthly basis the all-items index fell 0.1%, and rose 0.2% seasonally adjusted. Grocery inflation slowed to 2.8% from 3.1% and ran below the all-items rate for the first time since July 2024. The Bank of Canada's own preferred core measures barely moved: CPI-trim was 1.9% for a third consecutive month, CPI-median was 2.0%, and CPI-common eased to 2.6% from 2.7%. For a household, the mechanism decides which of these numbers touches them. Only variable-rate mortgages and lines of credit track the Bank's overnight rate, which has been 2.25% since the September 2 hold, with prime at 4.45%; fixed rates are priced off Government of Canada bond yields instead. The five-year Government of Canada benchmark closed at 3.63% on Thursday September 10, and when this entry was written on the morning of Monday September 14 that close was the newest reading the Bank had published; Friday September 11's had not been posted at that hour. It was posted afterwards, at 3.65%, two basis points above the Thursday close, so the direction this paragraph describes held into the end of that week. So an inflation print that leaves core measures near target does not by itself move a renewal quote — the bond market does, and it had already moved 21 basis points against borrowers between the 3.42% close of September 2 and the 3.63% close of September 10. Three dates carry the rest of the month. The Canadian Real Estate Association publishes its national resale package for August on Tuesday September 15, per CREA's own stated schedule, and July remains the latest month on its national statistics page until that lands. The Bank of Canada publishes the Summary of Deliberations for the September 2 decision on Wednesday September 16, the only window into how divided Governing Council was between its warning that upside risks to inflation have increased and its acknowledgement that new tariffs make growth less certain. Statistics Canada has scheduled the Consumer Price Index for September for Monday October 19, which puts one more inflation print in front of the Bank's October 28 announcement. Decide on your own numbers rather than on the national average. The Maple Syrup Money mortgage payment, affordability and stress-test, and rent-vs-buy calculators at maplesyrupmoney.com/tools/residential turn a renewal rate or a 4.45% prime into a real monthly payment and price renting against owning, and the commercial and investing calculators (cap rate, cash-on-cash, DSCR, cash flow analyzer) at maplesyrupmoney.com/tools/commercial do the same for income property. Not financial advice. For educational purposes only.

Rate Watch, week of September 7 through September 13: the week opened on Labour Day in Canada and Labor Day in the United States, a statutory holiday on both sides of the border, so the week's first trading and publishing day produced no primary-source housing, mortgage or rates release. Statistics Canada's Daily is issued Monday to Friday at 8:30 a.m. Eastern and skips statutory holidays, so no Monday edition was issued and Friday September 4's — August's Labour Force Survey, June sawmills, the June farm product price index and an announcement on sector-based producer price indexes — stood as the most recent macro print of consequence when the week opened. The Daily for Tuesday September 8 carried four releases — the Retail Commodity Survey for June, new motor vehicle registrations for the second quarter, securities statistics for the second quarter, and the Electric Power Selling Price Index for July — and not one of them touched housing, mortgages or rates. The Daily for Wednesday September 9 carried three releases — economic characteristics and the likelihood of first birth for 2017 to 2023, stocks of principal field crops as at July 31, and the Quarterly Rent Statistics for the second quarter of 2026 — and the third of those is the week's first housing print. It is carried in its own entry alongside this one: the average asking rent for a two-bedroom apartment across all census metropolitan areas combined was $2,130 a month in the second quarter, down 3.6% year over year, while asking rent rose over the same twelve months in Thunder Bay, Sherbrooke, Halifax and Saskatoon, and paid rent sits below asking rent in almost every metropolitan area where both are measured. The Quarterly Rent Statistics program is conducted with the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. The Daily for Thursday September 10 carried three more — Canada's international investment position for the second quarter, farm product prices for July, and an interactive dashboard on employment by industry in rural Canada for August — and none of the three touched housing, mortgages or rates either. The Daily for Friday September 11 carried two — the national balance sheet and financial flow accounts for the second quarter, and a leading indicator of international arrivals to Canada for August — and the first of those is the week's second housing print. It is carried in its own entry alongside this one: household mortgage borrowing slowed for a second consecutive quarter to $19.4 billion, the slowest pace since the first quarter of 2024, while mortgage interest payments rose 1.6%, the largest increase in two years, and the household debt service ratio still eased to 14.52% because disposable income grew faster than payments did. Residential mortgage debt is almost three-quarters of what Canadian households owe. Saturday September 12 and Sunday September 13 added nothing to that record, and nothing was scheduled to on either day. Statistics Canada's Daily is issued Monday to Friday, so no weekend edition was published and the September 12 and September 13 release slots both returned nothing; Friday September 11's edition stood as the Daily's most recent print when the week closed. Canadian and American bond markets were closed through both weekend days, so no new Government of Canada benchmark close was set on either: when this entry was extended on the morning of Saturday September 12 the Bank's series still ended at Thursday September 10's 3.63%, and it still ended there when the entry was extended again on the morning of Sunday September 13, with Friday September 11's close not posted to it on either morning. Freddie Mac's survey prints on Thursdays, so the week ending September 10 was still its most recent print through Sunday September 13. The Canadian Real Estate Association's national statistics still carried July 2026 as the latest month on both weekend mornings, and Ratehub's table was unchanged across them, its top rung still 4.09% on Sunday September 13. Markets on both sides of the border reopened on Tuesday September 8, and the Bank of Canada's benchmark series posted that session's close, Wednesday September 9's and Thursday September 10's, while Freddie Mac's survey, which prints on Thursdays, published on Thursday September 10 for the week ending that day. Through Sunday September 13, two of the numbers a borrower is deciding on have moved, and both of them sit on the fixed side, and the week closed with neither weekend day adding a third. Canadian and American bond markets had been closed on Monday September 7 for the holiday, so the Government of Canada benchmark curve carried Friday September 4's readings forward untouched, but the three sessions after the holiday did not leave it there. The five-year Government of Canada benchmark closed at 3.44% on Tuesday September 8, at 3.48% on Wednesday September 9 and at 3.63% on Thursday September 10 — a 15-basis-point jump in a single session, and that Thursday close had been the highest reading of the quarter. Thursday September 10's close had not yet appeared on the Bank's series when this entry was first extended on the morning of Friday September 11, one session further back than the Bank's ordinary one-session publication lag would put it; it was posted later that day at 3.63%, and Tuesday September 8's, Wednesday September 9's and Thursday September 10's closes were the only readings the Bank had published for the week as of Sunday September 13. The second move is American, and it answers the question the previous entry left open. Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey for the week ending September 10 printed a 6.76% 30-year fixed, up five basis points from the 6.71% of the week ending September 3, alongside a 6.09% 15-year fixed. That is a third consecutive weekly increase on the 30-year: 6.65% for the week ending August 20, then 6.66%, then 6.71%, now 6.76%. Thursday September 10 carried a second American release, and it speaks to volumes rather than rates. The National Association of Realtors published existing-home sales for August that morning, and they are carried in their own entry alongside this one: sales ran at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.98 million, down 2.0% from July and 1.2% below August 2025, while total housing inventory rose 3.2% month over month to 1.62 million units and the median existing-home price still gained 1.6% year over year to $429,100. Apart from those two rate moves — the Government of Canada benchmark's and Freddie Mac's — the figures a borrower is deciding on this week are the ones the previous week set, and the full set is worth restating. The Bank of Canada's overnight rate is 2.25% after the September 2 hold, its seventh straight, with prime at 4.45%. The 5-year Government of Canada benchmark yield closed at 3.63% on Thursday September 10, the newest reading the Bank had posted as of Sunday September 13, 21 basis points above the 3.42% of September 2 that had been the quarter's high until the three sessions after the holiday passed it, and 64 basis points above the 2.99% of June 24; it had eased to 3.40% by Friday September 4 before those three sessions reversed the easing. Ratehub's best available insured 5-year fixed, whose rate table carried a Friday September 11, 12:17 p.m. update stamp when this entry was extended on Saturday September 12, was 4.09% — a Big 6 bank and Simplii Financial tied there, then 4.14% from Alterna Savings and a Canadian lender, and 4.24% from Meridian Credit Union. The top rung held at 4.09% from Wednesday September 9 through Sunday September 13; underneath it the ladder tightened over the three trading sessions from Wednesday September 9 to Friday September 11, with Alterna joining the 4.14% rung and Scotiabank's 4.29% dropping out of the five lowest rates the table showed. The mechanism is the part worth holding on to, because it decides which of those numbers is the one that touches you. Fixed mortgage rates in Canada are priced off Government of Canada bond yields, so the 64-basis-point back-up in the five-year benchmark since June 24 is the pressure sitting under the best insured fixed rate, not anything the Bank announced. Only variable rates and lines of credit track the overnight rate, through prime, and prime did not move on September 2 and will not move again before the Bank's October 28 announcement. A household renewing this autumn is pricing that split rather than a policy decision. With the week of September 7 now closed, what remains ahead is a calendar rather than a verdict, and three dates on it carry the argument the previous week left open — whether the Bank's next move is a cut or a hike, with National Bank and Scotiabank now forecasting 2.50% in October and 2.75% before year-end while BMO, CIBC, RBC and TD hold 2.25% through December. The Canadian Real Estate Association publishes its national resale package for August on Tuesday September 15, per CREA's own stated schedule; July's package is the standing national read until it lands, and RBC's September 1 forecast update — resales rising every month since April, prices flat across most of the country, but 2026 still closing down 3.6% at 453,200 units before a 6.7% rebound in 2027 — is the frame it will be read against. The Bank of Canada publishes its Summary of Deliberations for the September 2 decision on Wednesday September 16 at 1:30 p.m. Eastern, and that is the one that speaks to the split: with no Monetary Policy Report attached to a September decision, the summary is the only window into how divided Governing Council was between the statement's warning that upside risks to inflation have increased and its acknowledgement that new tariffs make growth prospects more uncertain. Freddie Mac's next survey prints on Thursday September 17 at 12 p.m. Eastern, and that is the one that will show whether the American back-up runs to a fourth week. Decide on your own numbers rather than on the calendar. The Maple Syrup Money mortgage payment, affordability and stress-test, and rent-vs-buy calculators at maplesyrupmoney.com/tools/residential turn a 4.09% fixed or a 4.45% prime into a real monthly payment, and the commercial and investing calculators (cap rate, cash-on-cash, DSCR, cash flow analyzer) at maplesyrupmoney.com/tools/commercial do the same for income property. Not financial advice. For educational purposes only.

Statistics Canada published the national balance sheet and financial flow accounts for the second quarter of 2026 on Friday September 11, and the mortgage numbers inside it move in two directions at once. Households took on $19.4 billion in new mortgage borrowing over the quarter, down for a second consecutive quarter and the slowest pace since the first quarter of 2024. Total seasonally adjusted household credit market borrowing — mortgage loans, non-mortgage loans and consumer credit together — shed $5.0 billion to $29.4 billion, with the non-mortgage half slowing to $10.0 billion. Borrowing less is not the same as owing less: the seasonally adjusted stock of household credit market debt still rose, to $3,280.9 billion, and residential mortgage debt is almost three-quarters of everything Canadian households owe. The second direction is the cost of carrying it. Mortgage interest payments rose 1.6% in the quarter, the largest increase in the last two years, and that is what lifted total debt payments 1.0%. The household debt service ratio — obligated principal and interest as a share of disposable income — nevertheless eased to 14.52% from 14.68%, a drop of 0.16 percentage points, because disposable income grew 2.1%, faster than payments did. The ratio peaked at 15.16% in the first quarter of 2023. The same arithmetic runs through the debt-to-income ratio, which fell from 178.6% to 176.4%, its largest single-quarter drop since the third quarter of 2024, leaving households owing roughly $1.76 for every dollar of disposable income. None of that improvement came from cheaper mortgages. It came from income growing faster than debt, which is a different thing to be relying on. On the asset side, the value of household residential real estate edged up 0.4% in the quarter to $8,523.3 billion and was still down 0.3% from a year earlier. Housing was close to flat, in other words, in a quarter when equity markets did the work: household net worth rose 2.9% to $19.1 trillion, and the ratio of financial to non-financial assets reached its highest level since 2000, at $1.24 of financial assets for every dollar of non-financial. Statistics Canada's own note on distribution belongs beside that figure — 69.0% of financial assets and 49.7% of non-financial assets are held by the highest wealth quintile — so the national average of $462,336 in net worth per person does not describe a typical household. Residential investment did rebound 2.5% in real seasonally adjusted terms after two consecutive quarterly declines, and the total seasonally adjusted value of resale transactions rose 7.2%, while still marking the weakest second quarter for real estate sales since 2021. Read as a decision rather than as a statistic, the release describes households borrowing less for housing while paying more interest on what they had already borrowed, and balance sheets that improved because of markets and wages rather than because of rates. The Bank of Canada held the policy rate on both decision dates inside the quarter, and Statistics Canada notes that Government of Canada treasury and bond yields were largely flat across it — so the rise in mortgage interest payments is renewal arithmetic working through the stock of existing mortgages, not a fresh move in the rate. That is the number a household can actually act on. The Maple Syrup Money mortgage payment and affordability and stress-test calculators at maplesyrupmoney.com/tools/residential turn a renewal rate into the payment it produces, and the rent-vs-buy calculator on the same page prices the alternative. Not financial advice. For educational purposes only.

The National Association of Realtors published existing-home sales for August 2026 on Thursday September 10 at 10 a.m. Eastern, and it is the American half of the question this month keeps putting to the Canadian market: what happens to prices when volumes fall and listings pile up at the same time. Total existing-home sales — completed transactions covering single-family homes, townhomes, condominiums and co-operatives — ran at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.98 million units in August, down 2.0% from July and 1.2% below the August 2025 level. Every census region was flat or lower month over month. The Northeast recorded an annual rate of 480,000, down 4.0% from July and 2.0% from a year earlier; the Midwest 940,000, down 3.1% and 2.1%; the South 1.84 million, down 1.6% from July and unchanged from a year earlier; and the West 720,000, unchanged from July and 2.7% below August 2025. Lawrence Yun, NAR's chief economist, put the cause on financing costs: “Mortgage rates and home sales move in opposite directions, so it's not surprising to see a mild dip in home buying activity due to high mortgage rates.” The rate he is pointing at printed the same morning: Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey for the week ending September 10 carried a 6.76% 30-year fixed, a third consecutive weekly increase. The second half of the release is the part worth holding on to. Total housing inventory at the end of August was 1.62 million units, up 3.2% from July and up 5.9% from August 2025, which at August's slower sales pace worked out to 4.9 months of supply against 4.6 months in July and 4.6 months in August 2025. So listings grew, and the time it would take to clear them grew faster. And prices did not follow volumes down: the median existing-home price across all housing types was $429,100 in August, up 1.6% from the $422,400 of a year earlier. Homes that sold took 31 days to do it. First-time buyers accounted for 30% of August sales and all-cash transactions for 27% — a composition that describes who can still transact at these financing costs, which is largely the buyer who does not need a mortgage and the buyer stretching for a first one. A market where sales fall, inventory rises and the median price still gains is not a market clearing. It is one where the households who would sell into weakness mostly are not selling, because most of them carry a mortgage rate they will not be offered again, and a listing that never appears cannot discount. That lock-in is the mechanic to carry across the border, because it is the same reason a Canadian composite price index can sit unchanged for months while sales drift lower. The Canadian counterpart to this release, the Canadian Real Estate Association's national resale package for August, was scheduled for Tuesday September 15 and is carried in its own entry alongside this one. Decide on your own numbers rather than on the calendar. The Maple Syrup Money mortgage payment, affordability and stress-test, and rent-vs-buy calculators at maplesyrupmoney.com/tools/residential turn a fixed rate into a real monthly payment, and the commercial and investing calculators (cap rate, cash-on-cash, DSCR, cash flow analyzer) at maplesyrupmoney.com/tools/commercial do the same for income property. Not financial advice. For educational purposes only.

Statistics Canada published the Quarterly Rent Statistics for the second quarter of 2026 on Wednesday September 9, and the national number and the city numbers tell different stories. The average asking rent for a two-bedroom apartment across all census metropolitan areas combined was $2,130 per month, down 3.6% from the second quarter of 2025. That decline was not shared evenly. Asking rent fell year over year in Abbotsford–Mission and Calgary, both down 6.4%, in Montréal, down 5.2%, and in Vancouver, down 4.1% — and it rose over the same twelve months in Thunder Bay, up 6.5%, Sherbrooke, up 5.7%, Halifax, up 5.3%, and Saskatoon, up 5.2%. Level and direction are separate questions: Vancouver carries the highest asking rent in the country at $3,030 a month and is also among the larger decliners, while Halifax pairs its 5.3% increase with the fourth-highest asking rent at $2,400, behind Toronto at $2,650 and Victoria at $2,640. The part of the release that changes what a renter actually decides is the second measure. The Quarterly Rent Statistics program, which Statistics Canada conducts with the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, reports asking rent — the price posted on major rental listing platforms — alongside paid rent, the amount existing renters are currently paying under a formal lease and any increases since. Paid rent is available for 18 census metropolitan areas in the second quarter, and in almost every one of them it sits below asking rent. Vancouver's average paid rent of $2,470, the highest in the country, is $560 a month under its asking rent; Toronto's $2,160 is $490 under. Three exceptions are worth naming because they invert the usual pattern: in Calgary the asking rent is $1,890 and the paid rent $1,930, in Regina the asking rent is $1,480 and the paid rent $1,580, and in Edmonton the two are the same at $1,570. Statistics Canada offers two explanations for the gap, and both matter to a household weighing a move. Existing leases were signed in the past and, in provinces with rent control, are limited in how far they can be raised, so a sitting tenant is often carrying a price the current market no longer offers. The available stock and the occupied stock also differ in ways that have nothing to do with timing — age of building, location, and whether utilities, parking or upgraded finishes are included. The agency cautions that its asking rent estimates do not adjust for those quality differences, so part of the spread between what is listed and what is paid reflects different apartments rather than different prices for the same apartment. It also notes that some asking rent estimates should be used with caution because of missing data from one provider. Read as a decision rather than as a statistic, the release says a renter in most Canadian cities faces a listed price above the one already on their lease even in a quarter when the national average is falling, and that a renter in Calgary, Regina or Edmonton faces roughly the opposite. Neither situation settles whether to keep renting or to buy, which turns on the mortgage rate, the down payment and how long the household expects to stay put. The Maple Syrup Money rent-vs-buy calculator at maplesyrupmoney.com/tools/residential runs those against each other using a real rent figure rather than a national average, and the mortgage payment and affordability and stress-test calculators on the same page price the other side of the comparison. Not financial advice. For educational purposes only.

Rate Watch, week of August 31 through September 6: across the week's five days a single Canadian government primary-source housing release reached the tape, and no rates release did. Statistics Canada's Daily for Monday August 31 carried the Canadian Survey on Business Conditions for the third quarter, farm cash receipts, June energy statistics and three transport price indexes; the Daily for Tuesday September 1 carried a single release, second-quarter capital spending in the oil and gas extraction industries at $11.0 billion, up 7.2% from the first quarter; the Daily for Wednesday September 2 carried monthly average retail prices for selected products for July, built from Canadian retailer scanner data with no shelter or housing component; and the Daily for Thursday September 3 carried July merchandise trade, July trade in services, second-quarter labour productivity — up 1.0%, the largest quarterly gain since the second quarter of 2020 — and, under Housing, a Canadian Housing Statistics Program study of residential properties in high flood hazard areas. That study is the week's one Canadian housing release, and it measures structural risk rather than price or rates: set against Public Safety Canada flood hazard estimates for the 2022 reference year, 39.5% of residential properties in Manitoba's census metropolitan areas and agglomerations sit in high flood hazard areas, against 7.1% in British Columbia and 5.1% in Yukon, with Winnipeg, Chatham-Kent, Chilliwack and Vancouver named as the most exposed centres. Homes built between 2016 and 2022 in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and British Columbia were likelier to sit in those areas than older stock, and the estimates deliberately exclude existing defences such as dikes, so they describe what would be exposed if the dikes were absent rather than what is expected to flood. Nothing in the week moved a Canadian price, mortgage or rate number, which leaves Friday August 28's second-quarter GDP report as the standing latest Canadian figure of that kind. What the week carries instead comes from two places, and neither is a government statistic. The first is the decision itself: the Bank of Canada announced on Wednesday September 2 at 9:45 a.m. Eastern and held the overnight rate at 2.25%, with Governor Tiff Macklem and Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn Rogers on a teleconference-only press conference at 10:30 a.m. Eastern; the outcome and the statement's language are carried in their own entry. The second is private-sector: RBC Economics published a housing forecast update on Tuesday September 1 calling the start of a resale recovery for 2027, also carried separately. No Monetary Policy Report is attached — the next MPR lands with the October 28 announcement — so the statement itself, and the Summary of Deliberations due September 16, are the only windows into the Governing Council's thinking. On the decision itself there is no argument left: the Reuters poll published August 28 found all 35 economists surveyed expected the overnight rate held at 2.25%, and the bond market priced roughly a 3% chance of a 25-basis-point hike. The rate has been 2.25% since the October 29, 2025 cut, and the Bank had held at six consecutive decisions since, so Wednesday made seven straight. The disagreement has moved to what comes after it, and that is the shift worth noticing. Two of the big six — National Bank and Scotiabank — now have the policy rate rising rather than falling from here, to 2.50% in October and 2.75% before year-end. BMO, CIBC, RBC and TD have it held at 2.25% through December, with any move waiting for 2027. Six months ago the same panel was arguing about how much further the Bank would cut; the question now is whether the next move is up. For a Canadian household this is not an abstraction, and the mechanism decides who it touches. Fixed mortgage rates are priced off Government of Canada bond yields, not the Bank's overnight rate, so Wednesday's hold did not by itself move fixed pricing — what moves it is how the bond market reads the statement's tone. Only variable rates and lines of credit track the policy rate directly, through prime at 4.45%. So the hawkish call, if it is right, lands on variable-rate borrowers first and on nobody else immediately: the first upward move of the cycle would arrive in October, not as a forecast but as a payment. Anyone renewing this fall, or weighing fixed against variable, is really pricing that split — four banks saying the discount on variable keeps paying, two saying it starts costing. That mechanism is visible in the week's one genuine Canadian rate move, and it came from the bond market rather than from any release. The 5-year Government of Canada benchmark yield closed September 2 at 3.42%, which had been the highest reading of the quarter to that point and 43 basis points above the 2.99% it touched on June 24, easing to 3.41% the next day and to 3.40% on Friday September 4 — the tightening in financial conditions the Bank's own statement described. Fixed pricing followed it up: the lowest available high-ratio 5-year fixed on Ratehub, as of September 4, is 4.09%, five basis points above the level it had been anchored at, with a Big 6 bank and Simplii Financial tied at that rate and the next rungs at 4.14% from a Canadian lender, 4.24% from Meridian Credit Union and 4.29% from Scotiabank. The hold left prime at 4.45% untouched, so the borrower who paid more this week was the one shopping a fixed rate, and what moved it was the 43-basis-point back-up in the five-year benchmark rather than anything the Bank announced. On the American side the drift turned upward for a second straight week. Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey for the week ending Thursday September 3 printed a 6.71% 30-year fixed and a 6.04% 15-year fixed, up five and six basis points from the prior week's 6.66% and 5.98% — which had themselves risen from 6.65% and 5.95% and ended a two-week decline. That makes two consecutive weekly increases, puts the 15-year back to where it sat on July 30, and leaves both legs above their levels of a year ago, when the 30-year averaged 6.50% and the 15-year 5.60%. Freddie Mac's note on the move reports that “purchase demand has remained relatively stable indicating steady interest from buyers adapting to evolving market conditions” — the survey's way of saying the back-up in rates has not yet shown up as buyers stepping away. Because the survey prints only on Thursdays, at noon Eastern, 6.71% is the number that carries into next week. The Census Bureau's July construction-spending report did publish, on Tuesday September 1, and it moved the standing figure down: total construction spending ran at a $2,157.6 billion seasonally adjusted annual rate, 0.5% below the revised June estimate of $2,167.7 billion and 3.8% below July 2025's $2,242.6 billion. The residential line is the one that bears on housing — $859.0 billion, down 1.3% from June's revised $870.6 billion — while nonresidential went the other way, $755.2 billion and up 0.4%. Across the first seven months of 2026, construction spending is 3.5% below the same stretch of 2025. The demand side is where the strain shows: the National Association of Realtors' pending home sales index for July, released August 18, fell 2.3% to 71.2, its lowest since January 2026, with all four regions down and the West leading the decline. Friday September 4 closed the week with its largest data event on both sides of the border, and neither print was a housing, mortgage or rates release. Statistics Canada's Daily for the day carried the Labour Force Survey for August, June sawmills, the June farm product price index and an announcement on sector-based producer price indexes; the Labour Force Survey is the one that bears on the argument this entry is about. Canadian employment fell by 42,000 (-0.2%) in August, the first monthly decline after a cumulative gain of 181,000 (+0.9%) from April through July, and the employment rate slipped 0.1 percentage points to 60.8%. The unemployment rate did not move: 6.4% in August, the same level the Bank cited for July in Wednesday's statement, after three consecutive monthly declines in May, June and July totalling 0.5 percentage points. The composition is what a hawk and a dove would read differently — public-sector employment fell 20,000, a third straight monthly decline, and business, building and other support services shed 20,000 (-2.8%), while manufacturing added 22,000 (+1.2%); employment fell in Quebec (-19,000) and Ontario (-18,000) and rose in New Brunswick (+2,400). Average hourly wages were up 2.0% year over year at $37.02, cooling from July's 2.8%. The print therefore does not settle the question the headline poses: employment shrank, which cuts against the October hike National Bank and Scotiabank have penciled in, but the unemployment rate held rather than opening fresh slack, and wage growth cooled, which argues against the inflation pressure a hike would be answering. The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the American Employment Situation for August the same morning: nonfarm payrolls rose 162,000, well above the 31,000 average monthly gain of the prior twelve months; the unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.1%, with 7.0 million people unemployed; and average hourly earnings rose 10 cents, or 0.3%, to $37.75, up 3.1% over the year. Both prior months were revised up — June from a gain of 20,000 to one of 31,000, and July from a loss of 23,000 to a gain of 21,000 — which turns what had printed as a July contraction into a modest gain. For a Canadian borrower the transmission runs through expectations rather than through the announcement: a jobs print moves what the market expects the Bank to do next, that expectation prices Government of Canada bond yields, and those yields price fixed mortgages. Only variable rates and lines of credit move with the overnight rate itself, and the Bank does not meet again until October 28. Freddie Mac's survey prints on Thursdays, so the 6.71% above was set the day before these payrolls landed; the payroll number is an input to next week's survey rather than this one's. The weekend added nothing to that record on either side of the border: no primary-source housing, mortgage or rates release landed on Saturday September 5 or Sunday September 6, and the publication calendars are why. Statistics Canada's Daily is released Monday to Friday at 8:30 a.m. Eastern, so the September 4 edition stands as the week's last; Freddie Mac's survey prints on Thursdays, which leaves the week ending September 3 as the current reading, with the next print due Thursday September 10; and the Bank of Canada is not scheduled to announce again until October 28. The figures that carried into the week of September 7 are therefore the ones set out above — a 6.71% 30-year fixed and a 6.04% 15-year fixed for the week ending September 3, a 5-year Government of Canada benchmark yield that closed Friday September 4 at 3.40%, prime at 4.45%, and a best available high-ratio 5-year fixed of 4.09%. Decide on your own numbers this week rather than on the announcement. The Maple Syrup Money mortgage payment, affordability and stress-test, and rent-vs-buy calculators at maplesyrupmoney.com/tools/residential turn these rate and price levels into a real monthly payment, and the commercial and investing calculators (cap rate, cash-on-cash, DSCR, cash flow analyzer) at maplesyrupmoney.com/tools/commercial do the same for income property. Not financial advice. For educational purposes only.

The Bank of Canada held its target for the overnight rate at 2.25% on September 2, 2026, with the Bank Rate at 2.5% and the deposit rate at 2.20% — a seventh consecutive hold since the October 29, 2025 cut, and the outcome all 35 economists in the August 28 Reuters poll had expected. The decision was the easy part. What the statement said around it was not. Governing Council's stated reason for holding was that the economy and inflation are “evolving broadly as forecast in the July MPR” — but it paired that with a warning that “the upside risks to inflation have increased, while new tariffs make growth prospects more uncertain,” and closed on being “prepared to adjust monetary policy as needed.” There is no easing bias in that sentence. Governor Tiff Macklem's opening statement put the same point in three messages: growth has picked up after stalling for a year, the ongoing Middle East conflict is keeping energy prices higher for longer and has raised the upside risks to inflation, and the Bank is committed to keeping inflation close to 2% over time. The picture behind the hold: second-quarter GDP rose 3.3% after a very weak first quarter, and the pick-up was broad-based — solid consumption, some rebound in housing activity, and exports and business investment up sharply. The unemployment rate edged down to 6.4% in July on increased private-sector hiring, though the Bank still sees continued excess supply. CPI inflation has hovered around 3% in recent months on persistently high gasoline prices; excluding gasoline it was 2.2% in July, and core measures remained close to 2%. Since the July decision the United States has imposed new tariffs on Canadian exports and Canada has answered with counter-tariffs; the Bank puts the affected products at roughly 5% of exports to the US and does not expect a large direct hit to overall activity, but flags the added trade uncertainty as a reason businesses may delay investment and hiring. For a Canadian household the mechanism decides who this touches, and it runs opposite to the intuitive read. A hold leaves prime where it is, so variable-rate mortgages and lines of credit — which track the policy rate through prime — see no change today. Fixed mortgage rates do not track the policy rate at all; they are priced off Government of Canada bond yields. And the statement says those yields moved the wrong way: “Financial conditions have tightened since July. Long-term bond yields have moved up globally, including in Canada.” A hold at 2.25% is therefore not, on its own, a reason to expect cheaper fixed pricing this month. The Canadian dollar appreciated slightly on US-dollar weakness. The next scheduled announcement is October 28, 2026, and the next Monetary Policy Report is released with it; the Summary of Deliberations for this decision is due September 16.

RBC Economics published a housing forecast update on Tuesday September 1, 2026, and its headline claim is that Canada's resale market is finally turning — with a caveat the report supplies itself. Home resales have risen every month since April, new listings have levelled off, and prices have stopped falling across most of the country. On RBC's numbers 2026 still closes as a down year: 453,200 resales, a 3.6% decline from 2025, with the benchmark price index off 2.3% to $794,200. The turn shows up in 2027 — 483,600 resales, up 6.7%, against a benchmark price of $800,700, up 0.8%. That is a recovery in volume long before it is a recovery in price. Sales climb roughly eight times faster than values across the forecast, which is what a market clearing a backlog of postponed transactions looks like, not one bidding itself up. The caution attached to it is the more useful half. Assistant chief economist Robert Hogue writes that RBC has “counted four false starts since 2023, with external events (think trade war or energy price spikes) derailing what promised to be lasting, albeit gradual, improvement.” A fifth is possible, and the report names the single condition the call rests on: “The key to the outlook will be the extent to which sidelined homebuyers make their way to market.” Hogue puts that cohort at “hundreds of thousands of Canadians who put plans to buy a home on hold in the past several years due to sharp increases in ownership costs” — renting longer than they intended, or postponing an upsize or a downsize. The 2027 number is an assumption that those buyers show up. Two constraints sit against that assumption. The first is that the rate tailwind is spent. RBC expects borrowing costs to stay “as low as they will get this cycle,” with the Bank of Canada on hold through the end of 2026 and any move after that pointing up rather than down — a view the Bank's own September 2 hold did nothing to contradict. Improvement from here has to come from incomes and confidence, not from cheaper money, and the mechanism matters for anyone reading the forecast as a rate call: only variable rates and lines of credit track the policy rate through prime, while fixed mortgage pricing follows Government of Canada bond yields. The second constraint is that the recovery is not national. Ontario and British Columbia are working through prolonged corrections whose effect on sentiment outlasts the price declines themselves, with high condo inventory and thin investor appetite in Toronto and Vancouver, while the regions that held up better through the correction have correspondingly less room to rebound. A national average of those two paths describes very few actual households. The practical question is not whether RBC is right about 2027 but what a purchase costs at today's payment. The Maple Syrup Money mortgage payment, affordability and stress-test, and rent-vs-buy calculators at maplesyrupmoney.com/tools/residential turn a price and a rate into a monthly number you can test against your own budget, and the cap rate, cash-on-cash, DSCR and cash flow calculators at maplesyrupmoney.com/tools/commercial do the same for income property. Not financial advice. For educational purposes only.