New study shows how parental wealth significantly affects millennials and Gen Z's home ownership and property values in Canada
Recent research from Statistics Canada has delved into how parental wealth impacts the home ownership prospects of younger Canadians, particularly millennials and Generation Zs born in the 1990s.
The focus on the intergenerational transmission of wealth reflects growing concerns about how disparities in home ownership can perpetuate across generations.
The latest study in this research series, titled ‘Intergenerational housing outcomes in Canada: Parents' housing wealth, adult children's property values and parent–child co-ownership,’ reveals that 17.3 percent of residential properties owned by individuals born in the 1990s were co-owned with their parents in 2021.
This trend of co-ownership is more prevalent in costly urban markets like Toronto, Guelph, Abbotsford–Mission, Vancouver, and Victoria.
Notably, the study found that in about 30 percent of these co-ownership cases, the adult child resides in the co-owned property, while the parents live elsewhere. This arrangement often involves what is commonly known as mortgage “co-signing.”
Further findings indicate a significant correlation between the housing wealth of parents and the property values of their children.
In cities such as Toronto, Kelowna, Vancouver, and Victoria, children whose parents are at the top of the housing wealth distribution tend to own properties that are more valuable—ranging from 29.6 percent to 37.4 percent higher—compared to those whose parents are at the lower end of the scale.
These insights underscore the considerable influence of parental property ownership not only on the ability of children to access home ownership but also on the value of the properties they acquire.
This dynamic plays a critical role in the potential for these younger individuals to accumulate home equity and broader financial assets.
