Canadian house prices aren't in for a 'hard landing,' Moody's says + MORE Oct 18th

Even in Canada’s hottest real estate markets, a budget of $1.35-million would be considered a decent starting point. That’s good news for the recent relaunch of the online real estate brokerage Zoocasa.com.
Revealing its new website—and new focus—the much-needed cash-injection into Zoocasa.com enables the Canadian real estate brand to offer new, more sophisticated online tools for homebuyers and sellers.
How is it different?
Zoocasa.com operates as an online brokerage, as such the “rebuilt” user experience includes the ability to search and research by neighbourhood, an updated map search, and a promise of updating listings nine times more often than other real estate websites.
“Under the old Zoocasa, the site would post leads, then sell those leads to agents across the country; these real estate agents worked at a variety of brokerages, and weren’t actually affiliated with Zoocasa other than by purchasing those sales leads,” said Haw.
Promise of faster, better online searches
But the real estate industry is a traditional one, with a few big players that have, until now, controlled the real estate process…

Stock market dividends have long played an important role in the portfolios of investors, but their appeal with income-seeking investors has rarely been stronger in today’s slow growth economic environment marked by persistently low interest rates.
In the years leading up to the financial crisis, government bonds offered better yields than stocks, but more recently that relationship has been flipped on its head.
Dividends paid out by publicly-traded companies now yield more than government bonds in all major markets including Canada where the advantage favouring dividends is about as large as it’s ever been at just south of two per cent.

We believe these higher yields may persist and continue to support dividend stocks as long as interest rates continue to plumb to record lows globally. In all likelihood, this is the reality facing investors even if the U.S. Federal Reserve pulls the trigger on another rate hike later this year.
The Fed is in no rush to raise rates aggressively at a time when several of its global central bank counterparts are experimenting with negative interest rate policies in an attempt to kickstart their economies…

Expect slower price growth in the Canadian real estate market over the next five years, but no “significant declines” at the national level, Moody’s Analytics said in new report released Tuesday.

OTTAWA – The head of a group of China’s most powerful business leaders is calling on Justin Trudeau to open Canada’s trade and investment doors even wider to the Asian superpower.
Several members of the exclusive China Entrepreneur Club – often referred to as the billionaires club – met with the prime minister Tuesday for the second time in less than two months.
The entrepreneurs had planned to press Trudeau to ease what they see as “excessively rigid regulations” that hold back Chinese investors, club president Ma Weihua said in an interview with The Canadian Press.
“(Trudeau) himself expressed very clearly to support the business collaborations in the two countries,” Ma said through an interpreter as club members attended a business luncheon hosted by Invest Ottawa.
“So, I think today we will take this chance to express to him some of our requests and also some of our concerns.”
Ma underlined British Columbia’s new tax targeting foreign real estate investors in the sizzling Vancouver housing market – a measure he characterized as “unfair…

Canadian company aims to increase its already attractive payout by 10 per cent annually thanks to utility acquisitions and a growing portfolio of renewable power projects