Ron Butler from Angry Mortgage Podcast talks with Jon Flynn, a 21-year real estate veteran from Niagara, about how we got from normal housing prices to total insanity and back to crisis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWODFrLHLsI

When Jon Flynn started in real estate in 2004, a single family home in Niagara averaged $130,000. He remembers working with a busy realtor who accidentally countered an offer at $230,000 instead of $130,000. She laughed it off because she was “used to dealing with all these high-end homes.”

Twenty years later, those same modest homes peaked at unimaginable prices. Then they started collapsing. Flynn and mortgage broker Ron Butler traced exactly how this happened and why it will get worse before it gets better.

Phase 1: Vancouver Money Arrives (2015-2016)

The madness started when British Columbia blocked foreign buyers. Chinese millionaires who had been buying Vancouver real estate simply flew to Toronto instead. Their method was smart and legal. Send kids to Canadian universities. Get them PR status. Funnel money through them to buy property.

Toronto prices exploded. Within a year, the craze hit Niagara. Multiple offer nights became normal. Agents would line up buyers outside homes, check their prices, and literally tell them “Get out” if the number was too low.

Flynn says what happened in the GTA always arrived in Niagara about 12 months later.

Phase 2: Toronto Investors Invade (2016-2018)

Toronto homeowners discovered something. They could remortgage their appreciated homes, pull out equity, and buy cheaper properties in Niagara, Hamilton, and other regions. At first the rental math worked. You could rent to a family and break even.

But prices kept climbing beyond what rents could support. So investors switched to Airbnb. When cities cracked down on Airbnb, they pivoted to student rentals. When that collapsed, some literally chopped houses into pieces. Ten bedrooms in an 1,100 square foot house.

Each phase made less economic sense than the one before.

Phase 3: COVID Insanity (2020-2021)

Then COVID hit and things went completely crazy. December 2020 had the highest average home prices of the entire year. December is normally the slowest, lowest price month in real estate.

“That was a sign,” Flynn said. “Something was wrong.”

Ultra low interest rates. Work from home policies. Everyone believed office work was dead forever. Speculation hit levels nobody had seen before. GTA residents fled downtown condos where they waited an hour for elevators with three person limits. They bought everything available in suburban Ontario.

Butler remembers a client in Fort Erie who wanted to pay $700,000 for a basic bungalow. Butler asked why. The client said he had made $400,000 in real estate in the last two years. That was the thinking. Past gains justified any future price.

By 2021, every realtor rebranded as an investment expert. Social media made everything worse. Flynn made two and a half times his normal income that year. Butler made similar multiples. New realtors thought this was normal. They bought Hummers and multiple investment properties.

“Everybody and their brother and their mother were just buying houses,” Butler said. “It didn’t matter what you could rent them for. It didn’t matter what they were worth.”

Phase 4: The Student Explosion (2022-2023)

As interest rates rose and speculation cooled, a new distortion arrived. International students. Canada’s student visa approvals jumped from 172,000 nationally to 480,000 just in Ontario.

Private immigration consultant centers appeared everywhere. More than weed shops in Niagara Falls, Flynn said. Investors who couldn’t make money with families or Airbnb packed international students into houses.

Flynn described buses packed with students fighting to board. Security guards at Niagara College controlling crowds. Neighborhoods transforming overnight.

One story stuck with him. A realtor on his street sold a home to another agent who said her mother and daughter were moving in. On closing day, students with grocery bags stood on the porch. The house was soon chopped into 10 bedrooms.

The Collapse

By 2022, everything stopped. Interest rates spiked. Immigration policies tightened. The fundamentals that never existed could not be ignored anymore.

“Fundamentals are back,” Flynn said. “People want affordable family homes.”

Power of sales started appearing. First from reckless speculators. Now increasingly from regular homeowners. Each foreclosure creates a new, lower price. It drags down entire neighborhoods.

Both Butler and Flynn emphasize this point. What we see now in late 2025 comes from decisions made 9 to 12 months ago. The real pain from job losses has not fully hit yet.

“We haven’t really seen the families with job losses going into power of sale,” Butler said. “That’s the next wave.”

Where We Are Now

Flynn has listings at fair prices. Even below recent sales. Zero showings. One expensive listing had one showing in three months. The GTA investors who flooded Niagara during the boom have completely vanished.

Butler tracks regional numbers. Four Ontario regions are approaching average losses of $400,000 from peak prices. Vancouver and Calgary are grinding down too. The spring market showed no recovery in 2025.

“You cannot expect prices to go up this spring,” Flynn warned about 2026. “They might a little bit, but chances are they’re going to go down.”

The most sobering moment came when Flynn recalled 2012 and 2013. “I sold a house to a girl working as a shift manager at McDonald’s. Only one on title, only one on mortgage. Two people working at Tim Hortons bought a house. Legitimately, no fraud.”

Butler agreed. “When I started 30 years ago, ordinary people with absolutely average incomes were buying houses. Prices have not fallen anywhere near enough for that to come back.”

The Honest Assessment

Neither Butler nor Flynn sugarcoat the situation. They both made good money during the boom years. But they also warned people as far back as 2013 that prices were nuts. They were wrong about timing. Prices went much higher for much longer than seemed rational. But they were not wrong about the fundamentals.

“We just live the honest life,” Butler said. “Maybe it’s not doing us any good, but we did live the honest life.”

Their message for 2026 is clear. It will be rough. The correction is not over. If you are waiting for next spring to be better, it might be much worse.

All the distortions are gone now. Foreign money. Low interest rates. COVID insanity. Student visa explosion. What is left is the simple question that was buried for over a decade.

Can somebody actually afford to buy this house?

For too many properties in Ontario, the answer is still no.