Do Canadian home owners really move every seven years?

Canadian homeowners move every seven years on average, according to a statistic that has been frequently cited in the real-estate industry for years. From Simplii Financial, to RE/MAX, to the Canadian Association of Movers, to Borrowell, the number is often used to underscore why homeowners should beware of the high cost of breaking a fixed mortgage rate if they are forced to move earlier than expected.

But what is less clear about the statistic is its origin. The Globe and Mail set out to solve the mystery of the sourceless number and determine whether it is still accurate – given how high housing, mortgage and moving costs have become – if it ever was in the first place.

Our finding: Experts believe the number of years between moves is likely increasing, which they attributed to a combination of housing affordability issues and country’s aging population. But there is little agreement over how frequently Canadians move, and hard data is scarce.

So where did the seven-year number originate? Some websites indicate the statistic came from a Mortgage Professionals Canada report that found Canadians would own between 4.5 to 5.5 homes in their lifetime – which translates to moving roughly every seven years for someone who bought their first property at 25 and stopped buying at 65.

But the 2015 report turned out to be a red herring: It contained no such stat. When contacted by The Globe, report author and housing analyst Will Dunning speculated that any mention of the numbers 4.5 to 5.5 could have been erroneously pulled from an unrelated footnote.

Then a new clue emerged: In a 2012 article, Royal LePage president and chief executive officer Phil Soper said, based on his own calculations, Canadians moved house roughly every five to seven years. He told The Globe that the company last surveyed Canadians directly on how often they moved roughly a decade ago, which is how it arrived at that range.

Mr. Soper said Royal LePage periodically tests that assumption against data from the United States Census, which estimates Americans’ lifetime moves, and surveys from the National Association of Realtors in the U.S., which he said does more research than its Canadian counterpart. Royal LePage also looks at data from other moving and real estate associations, the Canadian Employment Relocation Council and Canada Post change of address data.

Mr. Soper acknowledged affordability challenges could be limiting homeowners’ mobility, but said five to seven years continues to be a “reasonable planning assumption.”

In an e-mail to The Globe, Statistics Canada communications officer Melissa Gammage said the agency doesn’t track lifetime moves. But Statscan data from last March found that in the two years leading up to 2021, 870,000 homeowner households moved, out of 15 million total households. With Canadian homeownership rates at 66.5 per cent, there are just shy of 10 million homeowner households – translating to only 4.3 per cent of homeowners who moved per year in that two-year period.

Using those numbers, The Globe’s back-of-the-envelope math produced an average time between moves of roughly 23 years.

“That’s too long,” Mr. Dunning said, given plenty of variability between homeowners – from Canadians who bought their home decades ago and never left, to those who buy a starter home and use it as a foothold to move quickly into another place.

“It probably really is something in the area of seven to 10 years.”

Aled ab Iorwerth, deputy chief economist at the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., said he doesn’t consider a potential average of 23 years between moves to be surprising, adding that it makes sense in a life-cycle context.

“People start by renting and as they grow richer they move into homeownership. Once they get into homeownership they probably don’t move that often,” he said.

A recent survey by Mortgage Professionals Canada had a similar finding. The survey, of just over 2,000 Canadian renters and owners, found that 43 per cent said they moved primary residences less than every 10 years, and 15 per cent said every six to 10 years. Fewer than 20 per cent of respondents combined moved more frequently than that.

“My guess is that the rate of mobility is trending down,” Mr. ab Iorwerth said, though the CMHC hasn’t studied it.

One of the main drivers of mobility is getting a new or better job, which is why the CMHC is particularly concerned about housing affordability in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. Those cities have started to see slower population growth, and Mr. ab Iorwerth said the CMHC believes home prices are the reason: “It’s deterring people from moving to cities” for work.

He also pointed to CMHC’s January, 2023, report that found the rental turnover rate – the percentage of renters who vacate their unit per year – was at 13.5 per cent in 2021, down from 15.5 per cent in 2020, which he attributed to ultra-low vacancy rates in multiple markets.

“People are finding it harder and harder to find a place to move into. That’s within the rental system, but also with higher mortgage rates they’re less likely to move into homeownership as well.”

Long-term, Mr. Soper said he expects affordability issues to not be just a constraint on mobility but a driver of it, with Canadians migrating to less expensive regions to buy. It’s a trend he said seems to already be underway, with Alberta and the Atlantic provinces seeing the highest rates of interprovincial migration this year, according to Statcan.

It’s a “seismic shift in migration patterns,” he said, given that British Columbia and Ontario used to be the top destinations for interprovincial migration.

And with the country’s aging population, Mr. Dunning said he expects moving trends to slow, as people tend to move more when they’re young. He also expects home buying and selling to be impacted by the downstream impacts of the Bank of Canada’s interest rate hikes – even beyond the current market slump.

“We’re still seeing a lot of construction going on, but those are houses that were sold when interest rates were at 2 per cent, not at 5 or 6 per cent,” he said. “We’re going to see housing starts fall a lot.”