In this post, I talk to Nadeem Keshavjee, a mortgage broker with Canada ICI, about the state of the mortgage market for multifamily properties during COVID-19.

Nadeem will be attending my upcoming virtual workshop from October 30 to November 1, 2020.

He indicated that since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, more funds were available for apartment buildings for CMHC-insured financing than from conventional lenders (non-CMHC-insured). Because of that, CMHC was hit with an immense surge of financing applications which resulted in very long turnaround times up to three months. 

As a result, last summer, CMHC issued guidelines restricting the use of funds on refinancing applications, or equity take-outs (see our blog post dated September 22, 2020) as a means to reduce the volume of applications.

Interest rates for CMHC-insured financing for quality borrowers and assets and in large centres for loan amounts in the range of $5M to $10M can be in the low 1% range and around...