This week brings a grab bag of mortgage updates, featuring musings from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. CEO Coleen Volk, Realtor.ca CEO Scott Neil, and concerning new developments in the mortgage rate market.
Let’s start with the latest threats to mortgage pricing.
Oil prices on the rise again
Oil prices have staged quite the comeback.
On Thursday, Brent crude futures roared past US$100 a barrel, as the United States struck Iran and Iran hit back across the Gulf, targeting Kuwait and Jordan.
Yemen’s Houthis joined in, striking two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea and blockading Bab al-Mandeb, giving oil a second major shipping chokepoint to go with the Strait of Hormuz, because one apparently wasn’t stressful enough.
The potential mortgage fallout is unambiguous. Global bond yields are hitting or nearing multi-year highs on fears inflation could reaccelerate.
And oil isn’t the only thing menacing mortgage rates.
Donald Trump‘s newest tariffs are a second threat.
The president has taken advantage of Canada’s weak response to U.S. trade aggression by slapping another 50 per cent penalty on $28 billion of Canadian exports to the U.S.
Some Canadian leaders are growing impatient with what they view as Prime Minister Carney’s passive and concessionary response, which critics say surrenders leverage, relies endlessly on unproductive, ongoing trade talks and delays the inevitable.
Assuming Trump’s tariffs are not just a negotiating ploy and take effect on Aug. 19 as announced, we can’t rule out Canada retaliating with more inflation-triggering tariffs of its own.
All of this comes as the North American economy gathers steam, thanks partly to AI investment. That could pour more fuel on inflation, assuming Trump doesn’t kneecap growth by following through on new tariffs.
Given all these risks, anyone shopping for a fixed-rate mortgage in the next four months should lock in a rate immediately, if not sooner.
CMHC’s CEO on mortgage competition
In an interview with MortgageLogic.news last week, CMHC CEO Coleen Volk said that mortgage default insurance fees are staying put, despite rising arrears.
“There hasn’t been anything that would cause us a real rethink on that,” she said, adding that the CMHC is the price leader on default premiums and they’re set for “the long term.”
On the government’s low-risk (and profitable) mortgage securitization program, which small and mid-size lenders rely on to compete with big banks, she admitted that, “We do have more demand than we are able to accommodate.”
Volk acknowledged that there may be segments of the mortgage market with insufficient competition.
Refinances are an obvious one to anyone in the mortgage business, given Big Six banks have a dominant cost advantage on non-default-insured mortgages due to their leading funding costs.
Volk didn’t want to comment on whether she supported a reintroduction of insured refinances, the one fix that would actually solve Canada’s competition problem with uninsured mortgages.
Insured refis “would be a decision of the Department of Finance,” she said. “Generally in life, it’s a good idea for me to not cross-thread myself with the Department of Finance.”
She added that insured single-family refinances are currently available for the construction of secondary suites. “Perhaps the Department of Finance would consider extending that,” she said.
Volk also declined to support raising the home value limit on “low-ratio” insured mortgages (i.e., those with 20 per cent equity or more) from $1 million to $1.5 million.
Doing so would significantly improve mortgage competition in that segment, critical in high-priced markets like Toronto and Vancouver. The reason being: securitized insured mortgages allow for significantly lower interest rates than uninsured mortgages.
CMHC already insures mortgages on properties up to $1.5 million for people with much less skin in the game, a mere 7.5 to 8.3 per cent down in those cases. And those properties have higher default rates than low-ratio mortgages.
Consequently, purchasers and mortgage renewers with $1 to $1.5 million homes and big down payments are left paying higher rates — for seemingly no other reason than the Department of Finance’s refusal to correct this problem.
Realtor.ca’s growing moat
Realtor.ca CEO Scott Neil told me in a recent interview that his website’s market share of real estate shoppers rose by five percentage points in 2025, to 61 per cent.
He credits slicker search tools for the gain and promises more artificial intelligence features to make home searching easier in the future.
AI, he acknowledged, can let house hunters type plain-language requests such as, “Find me houses with a sunset view and a backyard that faces west.” But he wasn’t confident that the website’s implementation of AI will actually be that user-friendly.
One thing it has going for it, however, is restrictive data access. “We likely have the most complete listing data in the market,” Neil said.
Canada has no aggregators that sell nationwide MLS data, so tech-savvy innovative competitors find it near-impossible to compete with Realtor.ca coast-to-coast.
By comparison, in the U.S., antitrust pressure has partly pried that door open, bringing more innovation to real estate search and analysis.
In any case, the portal’s dominant position lets it reinvest in itself, Neil said.
As for AI disintermediating real estate agents, Neil said, “There’s massive value in a realtor guiding you through that process, asking you the right questions, making sure that you’re thinking of everything…. I just don’t think AI can do (that) at this point in time.”
He also does not envision a time where customers will be able to list their homes themselves on Realtor.ca, due to the “complexity” of the process.
On mortgages, Neil acknowledged RBC’s privileged position on his website, which lets folks who see real estate listings click a link to the bank to get mortgage info.
“I believe there’s a great opportunity to provide more choice” for mortgage consumers, he adds. “And that’s something that we will likely pursue.”
There’s no telling, however, if Realtor.ca will ever have a true open marketplace of lenders and mortgage brokers on the site. Home shoppers would surely value that for comparison shopping, as opposed to being steered toward the handful of partners paying for the privilege of meeting them.
Robert McLister is a mortgage strategist, interest rate analyst and editor of MortgageLogic.news. You can follow him on X at @RobMcLister.
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