Finance committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, honourable members, and ladies and gentlemen. My name is Keith Lancastle. I'm the chief executive officer of the Appraisal Institute of Canada. Joining me is our national president, Dan Brewer, who is an AACI, P.App-qualified fully designated m

Finance committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Our organization would say that we believe that Canada's real estate market has been exceptionally well served by the regulatory framework that has been in existence. We have the opportunity to interact with our colleagues internationally and

Finance committee  No.

Finance committee  I would simply say that while real estate markets are local, there is interaction among national-level players, provincial-level players, and local-level players. It's important to engage all of those in developing solutions that respond to markets, whether they are particularly

Finance committee  The issue of mortgage fraud is also very complex. From interactions with our members, we are aware of situations in which they've prepared an appraisal report and somewhere along the road the base amounts have been altered, so hypothetically a member prepares a report valuing the

Finance committee  One of the efforts our organization has been involved in, for instance, has been to work with lenders to help them better understand how they can look at an appraisal and make sure a fraud has not been perpetrated as a result of it. Those are some of the things they might potenti

Finance committee  Anecdotally, our members are informing us that they are now seeing an increased level of activity in appraisals for second mortgages that seems to coincide with the introduction of the change to some of these requirements. It's for that reason we believe that all organizations th

Finance committee  Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and honourable members, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for the opportunity to again appear before this committee. We are very pleased to present our members' concerns and perspectives and recommendations to the Standing Committee on Finance

Finance committee  It's our belief that levelling the playing field is part of having a balanced marketplace. Certainly, what we are seeing now is people pursuing loans through non-federally regulated lenders, often at terms that are certainly not competitive. We're concerned about those potentiall

Finance committee  Our members work in a wide variety of environments, everything from very large employers, institutional employers, and public sector employers down to small businesses, as you've described. It's an issue our members are aware of. We support the notion of tax fairness but also rec

Finance committee  Again, we are an individual member organization. Some of our members are employed, some work for the Government of Canada, some work for provincial governments. For others who do own and operate their own business, it would be a greater degree of focus.

Finance committee  A significant portion of our membership works in the assessment community for provincial and municipal assessment authorities across the country. One of the elements in our professional standards is a new standard for mass appraisal, which is the methodology that is applied to

Finance committee  Mr. Chairman, honourable members, ladies and gentlemen, we are very honoured to be here again. We appreciate the opportunity to present our members' perspectives and recommendations to the Standing Committee on Finance as you prepare for your pre-budget consultation process. The

Finance committee  Our organization does not have any statistics on that. We do know that approximately 70% to 75% of the residential lending is still being offered through federally regulated financial institutions. Philosophically, we support the notion of providing consumers with the greatest d

Finance committee  Our perspective has been that we're not adding any additional stress to the system. Borrowers are not taking on any additional debt, so the public policy objective is not being encumbered by eliminating the stress test on renewals. As far as the remainder of the stress test acro