Real Estate investors from across Canada and the world look to Kitchener Waterloo as a destination for their investment capital (see: Waterloo Region in the news, and why Real Estate Investors care).
One reason, among many, is the proximity to the financial heart of Canada - Toronto, while still maintaining very affordable prices that allow investors to buy rentals that produce positive cash flow every month.
Today the Financial Post has a great story about Toronto emerging as a poweer player on the world stage. Toronto Rising:
“Canada’s economy and financial system has never looked so good to the rest of the world,” said Don Coxe, strategy advisor to BMO Capital Markets, who is based in Chicago.
In many ways, the stars have been aligning for nearly 20 years for Canada’s, and Toronto’s, time in the sun.
The initial drive to tame the deficit in the early 1990s — which many countries are now holding up as model for their own austerity drives — set the stage for personal income tax cuts while the recent commodity boom has helped pad government coffers further, and sent the Canadian dollar soaring.
Earlier this month, the French bank BNP Paribas mused that the loonie could become one of the world’s reserve currencies, a place where central banks and other institutions would park their money as a safe, solid store of value. Indeed, Russia has announced it has started buying the Canadian dollar as a plan to diversify away from the U.S. greenback
…
Toronto already has the makings of a great financial capital. It is ranked by the Global Financial Centres Index, a London-based group, as the third-largest financial hub in North America behind New York and Chicago, and 12th-biggest in the world.
The list takes into account such factors as the number of people employed, the availability of skilled workers, the level of taxation and the volume of transactions carried out.
Toronto is home to two of the world’s largest life insurers, five of the top 10 banks in North America and Europe and at least three of the top 50 pension funds, according to a recent report by Boston Consulting Group.
Financial services accounts for more than 20% of GDP in the Greater Toronto Region, with annual job growth of about 4.3%. The sector employed 220,000 people.
Related posts:
