Upside of the housing downturn…

Royal LePage CEO Phil Soper says that, like a lot of chief executives, he is prone to optimism.

But that didn’t stop him from calling Toronto the least healthy housing market in the country when prices were galloping ahead in the double digits in the first quarter of the year, peaking at 33 per cent year over year in March.

Soper says it’s not self-interest as a realtor that leads him to believe that Toronto’s slumped market will recover in the same way as Vancouver’s has. That market has lately rebounded after the B.C. government imposed a foreign buyers tax last summer, paving the way for Ontario to introduce a similar levy on non-resident transactions.

But does the situation today resemble the last big Canadian housing correction in 2009? Is it a crash rather than a bump? Soper doesn’t think so.