The two hottest housing markets in Canada are also the fastest-growing job markets in the country, according to the Bank of Montreal.
"Over the past year, Vancouver and Toronto accounted for all of the job growth in Canada," BMO Chief Economist Douglas Porter wrote in an update sent to investors this week.
Porter added that the rest of the country has "created precisely no new jobs in the past year," which he deemed "extremely unusual," since Toronto and Vancouver together account for 25 per cent of total employment in Canada.
Porter said the disparity highlights the "extreme regional divergence that the Canadian economy is now seeing." He also suggested the job numbers are at least partly tied to the white-hot housing markets in Toronto and Vancouver, which continue to outgrow all other markets in the country.
The Toronto Real Estate Board reported last month that residential property prices shot up by 12 per cent from March 2015 to March 2016, with the average price for a detached home now at $1.17 million.
The Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver reported a one-year price spike of 27.4 per cent, from March of last year. The average price of a home in Vancouver was at $1.34 million in March, the REBGV said.
