Canada’s dirty subprime secret
From the ramshackle, plywood deck on Brad Goodyear’s rural Vancouver Island home, most people see piles of trash, a mattress, abandoned appliances and heaps of salmon fishing nets.
Mortgage lenders, however, have looked at the same property and, until recently, seen nothing but cash.
But after two decades of continually borrowing up – plowing through mortgages from Royal Bank, private lenders and credit unions, until settling on two subprime lenders – the 46-year-old fisherman has landed in a foreclosure proceeding.
Records show that at least nine different lenders have given mortgages to Mr. Goodyear and his wife Tracy since they bought the Ladysmith property in 1986, producing a constant flow of new loans, which were sometimes paid off with newer loans, until financial institutions shut the window a few months ago.
“I didn’t really have to show anything to borrow,” Mr. Goodyear said of his two remaining mortgages, both in default and totalling about $340,000. “I didn’t have to show them my tax returns. I just said ‘This is how much I make.’ I think I made 11,000 bucks.”
Mr. Goodyear is not alone. A Globe and Mail investigation into more than 10,000 foreclosure proceedings has uncovered a burgeoning subprime mortgage problem that many, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper, have insisted does not exist in Canada.
Data obtained from both the governments of British Columbia and Alberta, as well as from two private companies that specialize in tracking foreclosure proceedings, show that lenders are foreclosing on the homes of overextended borrowers at an alarming pace. Even more startling is that more than half the foreclosures in 2008 were initiated by a mish-mash of subprime lenders who targeted riskier borrowers with tarnished credit histories. The numbers tell a story of thousands of homeowners who borrowed more than they could afford from lenders who lent too readily.
Inventories of unsold homes are building in Canadian cities – and the ripple effect hits everyone, depressing the value of houses owned by people who haven’t overextended themselves.
Unlike the United States, where foreclosure statistics are routinely published because they are a key barometer of economic health, detailed numbers in Canada are hard to come by. Alberta and British Columbia are two provinces where private companies collect the data from the courts, where it costs about $10 to view a single file. In Ontario, mortgages in default are usually resolved through a process known as power-of-sale, which has effectively removed the issue from the courts and shielded the scope of the problem…
From Saturday’s Globe and Mail
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Posted by John Malloy
on Mar 14 2009. Filed under International.
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