Diana Mousaly spent months searching for a home in Windsor, Canada’s southernmost city. It was the height of covid-19 and prices were rising across the country. Ms Mousaly, a 27-year-old clerk at the local police service, viewed nearly 100 homes and made 60 or so offers—often at hundreds of thousands of Canadian dollars above the asking price—before finally closing on a property last September. A decade ago, her parents purchased a home for half the amount. “It’s four times bigger than mine,” she sighs.
Ms Mousaly may have bought at the wrong time. For the past two decades, Canada’s white-hot property market has burned ever brighter. Now things are cooling down: prices have fallen for three consecutive months. The same is true in other frothy markets. In New Zealand, where valuations at the end of 2021 were up by 45% since the start of the pandemic, the price of a home has also fallen for three straight months. In Sweden, prices fell by nearly 4% in June, the steepest monthly decline since the global financial crisis in 2007-09. Two in five homes in Australia are worth less than they were three months ago.
