Nick Noorani Website

Well-educated immigrants buying single-family homes in the Ottawa suburbs have played a strong role in keeping the area housing market healthy, a CMHC conference was told yesterday.
“Immigration is one of the vital components in population growth in Ottawa,” said senior market analyst Sandra Perez Torres, adding immigrants make up 73 per cent of the new population. And, with this comes a healthy boost to the educated workforce. Between 2001 and 2006, 64 per cent of new Canadians living in Ottawa held a university or college degree.
The unemployment rate of immigrants is six per cent, slightly higher than the average 5.1 per cent.

Ms. Perez Torres said on average it takes between five and seven years for an immigrant family to buy a home. And in the meantime, this drives up the need for rental properties.
And when families are ready to buy, she said they usually buy bigger homes because by then they have larger families.
This in turn has kept the capital-area real market from the sort of slides being felt elsewhere.
Overall, Ottawa’s employment growth continues to drive the real estate market.
Ms. Perez Torres said the annual employment growth remains, for the most part, healthy, in Ottawa.
The service industry, which is 50 per cent of Ottawa’s market, has increased by four per cent over last year; public administration, which makes up 20 per cent of the city’s work force, has increased by 20 per cent since 2007; and trade, which is 30 per cent of the employment market, increased by 1.3 per cent.
However, she stressed, “all is not rosy”, and points out that manufacturing and construction, which comprise 10 per cent of Ottawa’s employment, are down 13 per cent and 15 per cent, respectively.
She also noted that Ottawa residents had a higher average weekly wage of $950, compared to other major Canadian cities.
She said housing prices in 2009 are expected to increase at a rate “similar to the rate of inflation,” with the average home costing about $300,000.
Overall, sales in Ottawa are expected to moderate in 2009 to 13,400 from 14,000 in 2008 and 14,739 in 2007, which set the record in sales over 12 years.
http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/bustech/story.html?id=d8590d36-e5e9-47d1-b3c6-6af721267f81