Brad Macdonald, Broker - The MAC Team

10/19/2026

Fourteen applications in three years. That is how many Markham homeowners asked to build the maximum number of units on one lot since the province allowed three in 2022, and four were approved. That is the demand all the fourplex shouting was about. Council passed four units per lot 7 to 6 in February, the mayor vetoed it in March, and Ottawa pulled $7.36 million from Markham's housing deal in April.

With voting open until Sunday the 26th, I wrote up how we got here, what you can still build on your lot today, and the one question I would ask any candidate who knocks.

🔗 Link to article in comments below

Markham council passed four units per lot by one vote in February, the mayor vetoed it in March, and Ottawa pulled $7.36 million in April. With voting open until October 26, a local broker on what the fight was really about, what you can still build on your lot today, and the one question worth ask

10/05/2026

The Bank of Canada Just Admitted It Can't Fix Housing Affordability

On the first day of October, in front of a business audience in Victoria, the Bank of Canada's second-in-command stood up and said something refreshingly plain: the Bank cannot fix housing affordability, and Canadians should stop expecting it to. Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn Rogers called the policy interest rate "a blunt tool" that sets one price for borrowing across the entire economy, and pointed out that no setting on that dial builds a single home (Bank of Canada, "Canada's Housing Affordability Dilemma", October 1, 2026).

I have been waiting years for a senior official to say this in public, because I hear the opposite assumption at kitchen tables every month. Buyers tell me they are holding off until the Bank sorts things out. Sellers price a house on the theory that the next cut will send buyers stampeding back. Rogers spent half an hour explaining why both camps are leaning on a rescue that is not coming.

One rate, two bad options

The heart of her speech was a bind the Bank cannot get out of. Cut rates to help buyers and prices tend to rise, which takes the help back. Raise rates to cool prices and you squeeze every borrower and business in the country to get at one sector. And a deliberate attempt to push house prices down would land on household wealth in a way no central bank can be casual about, because roughly half of all bank lending in Canada is tied to residential real estate (BNN Bloomberg, October 1, 2026). Whatever your politics, that is the arithmetic the Bank is staring at.

She added a number I found sobering. In 2000, Canada put 4.3 per cent of its GDP into residential investment and 8.3 per cent into business investment - the machinery and technology that make wages grow. Those two numbers have since traded places (The Globe and Mail, October 1, 2026). We have spent a generation pouring our savings into each other's houses, and Rogers was direct about this sitting at the heart of the country's productivity problem. She also pushed back on the idea that cheap pandemic money alone caused the boom, noting that immigration, building constraints and speculation all fed the roughly 50 per cent jump in average prices over two years.

So where does help actually come from? Her list was short and unglamorous: more supply through zoning and planning reform, infrastructure to serve it, and restraint about policies that add demand to markets that cannot build fast enough. Every item on that list lives with provinces and municipalities, not with the Bank. For those of us in Markham, the decisions that will move affordability are the ones I wrote about before the municipal election: where the next 44,000 homes go, and what happens to the fees and timelines that shape what builders can actually deliver.

Planning around a Bank that will not rescue you

First, make your plans at today's rates, not tomorrow's rumoured ones. The Bank held its policy rate at 2.25 per cent on September 2, the seventh straight hold, and the next decision comes October 28 (Bank of Canada). Cuts may come eventually. But Rogers has now said directly that restoring affordability is not the Bank's project, so any cut will be about inflation and the broader economy, and the bond market that actually prices fixed mortgages spent September pushing those rates up, not down. If the math on a purchase or a renewal works at current rates, it works. If it only works after an imagined rescue, it does not work, and no amount of waiting changes that.

Second, if you are selling this fall, build your price on the last sixty days of comparable sales rather than on a theory about spring. I have watched sellers sit on the market since Labour Day waiting for a rate story to save an ambitious list price. The official most responsible for that story just told everyone, politely and in public, to stop waiting. Price to the market in front of you, present the home properly, and let the house compete on its merits, because the referee has confirmed she is not coming off the sidelines.

09/28/2026

What City Hall Actually Decides About Your Home

Markham's municipal election is underway. Special ballots opened today, September 28, at Elections Markham headquarters, online voting runs October 16 to 26, in-person voting runs October 23 to 26, and 63 certified candidates are standing for mayor, regional council, ward council and school board (City of Markham, Elections Markham). I will not be telling you who to vote for, and no candidate is named anywhere in this post. What I can offer, after years of watching decisions leave the Civic Centre and land on my Clients' kitchen tables a few months later, is a plain map of which parts of your home's value are actually decided at city hall, and the questions I would put to anyone who knocks on your door between now and voting day.

Start with what is not on this ballot. Interest rates belong to the Bank of Canada. Mortgage qualification rules, the tax treatment of your principal residence and the HST rebate on new builds are federal and provincial files. The Residential Tenancies Act, the Condominium Act and the rules governing agents all live at Queen's Park. Nobody running next month can move any of those levers, and a candidate who implies otherwise has earned a follow-up question.

The zoning pen is the big one

What council does hold is closer to home. Zoning and the Official Plan decide what can be built beside you, how tall the towers along Highway 7 and Yonge Street can rise, and whether a garden suite or a second unit is allowed on your lot. Markham signed a pledge in March 2023 to deliver 44,000 new homes by 2031 under the province's Bill 23 (City of Markham), and the council elected next month decides where those homes actually go - on the intensification corridors, at the GO stations, or inside the stable neighbourhoods. That single question shapes the streetscape and the resale value of every house in Unionville, Markham Village and Thornhill more than anything else on the ballot.

Development charges are the quiet one. These are the fees a builder pays per new unit for roads, parks and services, and TRREB's submission to the city's 2026 budget notes that Markham's charges rose roughly 30 per cent between 2020 and 2024, adding tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of a new home (TRREB, 2025). The builder pays, the price of the new home absorbs it, and that new home then becomes the comparable your resale house is measured against, so the fee reaches you even if you never buy new. Property tax splits two ways: council sets the city's share, while the regional councillors you elect - eleven candidates are contesting those seats - also sit on York Region council, which sets the regional share along with water and wastewater rates. And council sets the pace at the permit counter, which in practice is the difference between a basement apartment approved in two months and one that takes eight.

What I would ask at the door

Every candidate will say they support housing, so skip the yes-or-no version and ask where the 44,000 homes should go: mid-rise on the arterials, towers at the GO stations, fourplexes on residential streets, or some mix, and what they would say to the neighbours who object. Ask what they would do with development charges - hold them, trim them for multiplexes as TRREB has asked, or raise them to fund growth - because there is no free answer here and the candidates who understand that are the ones worth hearing out. On property tax, the honest version of the question is which services they would trade for a lower increase, or which increase they would accept to protect services. And ask how long a homeowner should wait for a garden suite permit, and what specifically they would change at the counter. I find the permit answer tells you more about how a candidate thinks than any brochure does.

Personalized voter letters go out in early October. If yours has not arrived by October 16, check your registration at ElectionsMarkham.ca or at the Civic Centre on Town Centre Boulevard. Online voting opens October 16 and runs through October 26 - Markham has run online voting longer than any municipality in Canada - and the in-person voting places are open October 23 to 26. If you moved within the city this year, or bought here since the last election, make sure the voters' list has your current address, because the letter goes to the address on the list, not the one on your mortgage.

More of your home's day-to-day value than most owners suspect is decided in that building on Town Centre Boulevard. Read the letter when it comes, look up your ward, ask the questions above, and vote whichever way you land.

09/24/2026

✅ New price. New opportunity.
📍 208 Queens Quay West, Suite 804, Toronto

This 1 bedroom plus den at Waterclub 2 sits on the 8th floor with a southeast exposure over Lake Ontario. Two bathrooms, a granite kitchen, a den overlooking the water, and a private balcony - all in a layout that lives larger than 712 sq. ft. suggests.

Maintenance covers water, heat, hydro and central air, and one parking spot and one locker are included. If you’ve been running the rent-vs-own math on downtown Toronto, this is the kind of unit that changes the answer.

Comment VIEW and we’ll send you the full listing, gallery and floor plan.

https://waterclubcondos.ca

Now offered at: $675,000


FirstTimeBuyer Tony Sachdev Brad Macdonald, Broker | The MAC Team

09/23/2026

There is a road in the GTA that can cost a home buyer about $20,000 to cross. Toronto charges its own land transfer tax on top of Ontario's, and Markham does not.

If you know someone house hunting in Toronto, share this with them.

Illustration only, before rebates. Confirm with your lawyer.

Brad Macdonald, Broker - The MAC Team - REMAX All-Stars Realty Inc., Brokerage

09/21/2026

A broken toilet flapper, a clogged bowl and a shut-off valve that would not turn cost two condo owners more than $42,000, plus court costs, and the court did not need to find they had been careless. Ontario's Condominium Act only asks whether something in your unit caused the damage.

Four things to do this week: turn every shut-off valve and replace any that sticks, show your tenant where they are, check that your policy covers the building's deductible, and never hand over keys without a copy of the tenant's insurance.

Full post on the website - link in comments.

09/18/2026

Open house Sunday, September 20, 2 to 4 PM.

If the family has outgrown the space but not the neighbourhood, this is the house to see this weekend. Custom built in 2009 with nearly 2,600 square feet, four bedrooms and five bathrooms, high ceilings, oversized windows and three skylights, and Fairfield Park behind the back fence.

An 11-minute walk to Islington station, in the Norseman and Etobicoke Collegiate catchments. The finished lower level is a permitted legal studio apartment with its own entrance, which works as the grandparents' floor, a mortgage helper, or a rec room again by removing one door and a short wall.

$1,675,000. 1113B Islington Ave, Etobicoke.

Come by Sunday, or message us to book a private showing. If you know a family that needs more room and doesn't want to leave the city, send them this.

09/14/2026

Ontario's rental rules change this Sunday, September 21, and if you own a rental condo, a basement apartment or an investment townhouse in Markham, a few things you may have taken for granted are about to work differently. The notice period for unpaid rent drops from 14 days to 7, "persistent late payment" finally gets a legal definition, and the one-month compensation on an owner's-use N12 can be waived if you give 120 days' notice instead of 60.

There is also a wrinkle for anyone selling a tenanted property: the compensation waiver does not apply when a buyer needs the unit, so a seller who promises the tenant can be moved out for free is giving the wrong information.

I have laid out what changes, what it means for landlords, tenants and sellers, and what I would do about it before the 21st. Full post here:

On September 21, 2026, Ontario's N4 notice period for unpaid rent drops from 14 days to 7, persistent late payment gets a legal definition, and the one-month compensation on an owner's-use N12 is waived with 120 days' notice. What each change means if you own a rental condo or basement suite in Mar

09/02/2026

As expected - Bank of Canada holding rates steady.

The Bank of Canada held its policy rate at 2.25 per cent on September 2, 2026, but fixed mortgage rates are still drifting upward on rising bond yields. What Markham buyers, sellers, and homeowners facing a renewal this fall should do about it, with current local market numbers.