My Real Estate Blog - Market Trends, Tips & Updates

Homebuyers looking for a mortgage are finding conditions are getting tougher if they are self-employed, at a time when there is an increasing number of self-employed Canadians. Solid credit scores are multiple years in business are still not making it easy for business owners to buy their own home.

Chad Oyhenart, a Vancouver-based mortgage broker at Dominion Lending Centres told The Financial Post that conditions are tougher as the result of rule changes over the past 7 years: “They just want to make sure that they’re not putting Canadians into situations that they can’t get out of, so that we don’t end up being the U.S.”

Jeff Mark of Spin Mortgage also sounded a supportive note for tighter regulations commenting that they were too loose in the past. He says that the self-employed may have to take larger incomes from their businesses, meaning more tax to pay, in order to qualify for mortgages.

The rule-tightening comes at a time when the number of Canadians working for themselves is steadily on the rise, growing to roughly 2.7 million in 2014, according to Statistics Canada. That’s an increase of more than 10 per cent over the past decade.