Thank you, Madam Chair.
I'm always honoured to be here. I'm an old man who has followed politics my whole life, and it's still a thrill. Thank you for inviting me. I enjoy being here.
Our mortgage brokerage operates in three provinces—Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario. We get lots of calls. We're talking about 1,700 to 2,500 calls a month from people who have mortgage issues or renewals. It's chiefly renewals. This is the biggest time for renewals ever. There are more mortgage renewals happening this year than ever before in the history of Canada.
Overwhelmingly, they illustrate the nature of our economy today in Canada. They illustrate a K-shaped economy. We have a certain number of people who call us, and they're quite comfortable with the increase they're getting. Because they got their mortgage five years ago, 65% to 70% of them are getting an increase in their mortgage. Rates were incredibly low, and they're higher now. People had a 1.69%, five-year fixed mortgage in 2021, and now they're getting about 4%. That's a significant rise.
The group of people at the top of the K are somewhat annoyed and a little concerned, but they're fine with it. They can easily handle this mortgage rate increase. The payment increase is never the same amount. It's always a bit lower, percentage-wise, than the actual rate increase, so they can manage it. However, for the majority of people at the bottom of the K, it's a problem. In Canada today, we're all aware that inflation has eaten into family budgets. When we then move it forward into a 20% or 22% increase, let's say, in their mortgage payment, that is a different world. It's a meaningful change, and it's a problem.
We're approached to do restructuring and refinancing, to change amortization and to lower payments. What really hits us when we do this is that there's becoming an incredible importance to when you bought your house. That sounds crazy in a big, western country like Canada, but if you bought your house in 2015 and prior, you're probably pretty good, if you didn't refinance. You got a good price on your house when you bought it, you have a smaller mortgage and you are in pretty good financial shape. However, if you bought in 2018 and onwards, particularly in some provinces, you have a very expensive house and a large mortgage, and you're not in such great financial shape. In fact, in some cases, 50% of your net after-tax income is going to mortgage payments, property tax, other sorts of utilities and other types of payments.
There's something fundamentally wrong about that, if you think about it. Should it just be this strange bit of magical luck of when you were born? I'm a boomer, so I always make fun of boomers. We're all just people who don't realize how lucky we were.
That's something interesting, though. That should be interesting to everybody in government. At that moment when you were the right age and you bought that house in the 1980s, the average first-time buyer was 27 years old. Last year, they were 40. That should be meaningful to everybody in government, that we are denying a lot of young people the chance to own a home. If you have to wait until you're 40, you're not young anymore. At least, I don't think you feel young. Twenty-seven is a much better age to be buying your first home, and that's realistic.
Again, my thanks to the committee. If there are any questions, I'm happy to take them.