It’s always been expensive to own a home. But with real estate prices at a high, one expert says those born in generations who were able to get in the market before it spiked in the last decade or so have won a kind of “birth-year lottery.”“This idea of the birth-year lottery is that real estate has really kind of separated the wealthy from the not wealthy, the haves from the have-nots,” says John Pasalis, president of real estate brokerage company Realosophy. “Because if you were born, say, in the mid-’70s to early ’80s and you were kind of at that age where you could have bought a house or a condo 10 years ago, then you’re sitting on a pretty decent portfolio of real estate,” Pasalis says. “But if you’re a millennial who’s trying to get into the market today, well, you’re kind of out of luck because house prices are pretty much sort of at the highest level right now and it’s very prohibitive to get into the housing market.”It’s not just about the year you were born. A variety of factors affect how easily someone can afford to buy a home in the GTA, including but not limited to whether you have help or an inheritance from family, how much student debt you’re carrying and even whether you’re single or in a relationship with another income to count on. But as sky-high real estate prices outpace incomes, each of these factors takes on even bigger significance, because the market is so tough to enter, experts say. The average selling price of a GTA home this past August was $792,611, more than double what it was 10 years ago, according to data from the Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB); in August 2009, that number was $387,921.An RBC report focusing on the last quarter of 2018 found that, on average in the Toronto area, 66.1 per cent of someone’s household income was required to cover the costs of home ownership, up from closer to 45 per cent in 20 ...
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