Home Capital scandal may presage a slowdown: Don Pittis

Could the scandal at Home Capital just be the beginning? The Canadian alternative mortgage company halted its shares after it was revealed that some of itsbrokers had been falsifying information on the income of mortgage customers.

As the soaring housing markets in Alberta and Saskatchewan gooff the boil, a gradual weakening in Canada'sroaring real estate business may reveal more irregularities in the market.

It is a phenomenon we have seenhappen so frequentlythatthe uncovering of scandal in a market is often seen as a cause rather thanasymptom of a market's decline. Sometimes they go hand in hand.

• Home Capital cuts ties with 45 brokers
• TransUnionexpects spikein delinquencies

On a conference call yesterday Home Capital CEO Gerald Solowayinsisted that the problem with its brokers was not an indication of a mortgage fraud crisis across Canada. Home Capital's delinquencies remain low, and the company says it has stopped doing business with the brokers that investigators had shown to be pretending customers' income qualified them for mortgages.

Pressure to succeed

It is hard to draw a direct line of cause and effect between the first few scandals in a weakening market and that weakening.

But as markets get into trouble, more and more accounts get shuffled off to the riskier end of the business. Pressure to succeed intensifies.People trying to make a living are more willing to take shortcuts. And it is only as the markets weaken that shortcuts or outright fraudare revealed.

There are many examples but the most notoriouscase isBernie Madoff, author of what many consider be the biggest swindle in U.S. history. Madoff'sscheme was to accept investors' money and falsify the income statement on their investment returns. Even as other funds began to do badly,Madoff'sremained strong.

As we now know,Madoffwas pocketingmost of the funds and usingthe money from new investors to pay anyone who wanted to cash out.

It wasn't until markets began tofall in 2008that, despite a last-minute push for more clients to keep the system running,Madoffhad more redemptions than he could cover. The scheme was found outand Madoffwas convicted of fraud.

Different magnitude

Of course the Home Capital scandal is of a completely different magnitude,and there is no suggestion of a possibleMadoff-like Ponzi scheme here.

As mortgage insurers and banks have been tightening their criteria, wary of a market that even the Bank of Canada has declared 30 percent overvalued,more and more business has been flowing toward alternative lenders.

In the case of Home Capital, the company insists thebrokers who falsified informationamount to only 53 of 4,000 brokers the company works with.

But the company also revealed that these 53 brokers originated $960 million worth of business from a total in 2014 of $7.6 billion. In other words, the bad apples were producing a hugely disproportionate share of the business. They were the most successful.

CBC News reported in 2012thatthe subprime sector was been growing in Canada, but itis by no means the Wild West seen in the U.S. subprimemortgagemeltdown of 2007 that led to the global banking crisis of 2008.

• Canadianmortgage market tiptoes toward subprime

In the U.S. subprime crisis, a demand forloans to sellto global financial institutions pushed mortgage brokers to find customers who were less and less qualified. It was only after property prices began to stabilize and fall that it turned out many borrowers could not begin to cover their mortgage payments, leading to a collapse in prices and waves of delinquencies.

There are worries that a similar demand by the financial sectorfor subprime automobile loans in the U.S. and Canada could lead to another crisis if borrowers begin to lose jobs in a broadbased recession.

Trouble ahead

This is exactly the kind ofconcern reported this week by credit analysts TransUnion, specifically targetingthe oil-producing areas of Alberta and Saskatchewan.

"TransUnion Canada, which assigns credit scores to millions of consumers who hold credit cards, mortgages, car loans and credit lines, said overdue payment levels could soar as much as 60 per cent by year's end in such oil dependent Alberta communities as Fort McMurray," reported the Edmonton Journal.

The credit analysts say that if lenders use the normal indicators of default, the indicators used when there is no generalized slowdown, they can be caught unawares.

So far, in most parts of the country, the housing market remains stable. But ifinterest rates rise and or the country heads deeper into recession, the trouble TransUnion predicts for Alberta could be coming to the rest of us.

Having seen one irregularity in a sector so crucial to the country's economic health, regulators will be on the watch for more, hoping to nip them in the bud before they lead to greater trouble.

Perhaps the scandal at Home Capital is a unique example, a one-off,and now that the company has revealed all, there will be no more trouble in the Canadian housing market. Perhaps there are no more secret shortcuts to be uncovered.

We would need some moreexamples to find out for sure.

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