This week in charts
CapEx % of EBITDA
Foreign flows into Canadian securities
Canadian investment in industrial machinery and equipment
Passive ETFs and mutual funds
Magnificent 7 vs. S&P 493
Hyperscalers – CapEx growers and % of operating cash flow
U.S. domestic investment
S&P 500 companies’ revenue per worker
2024 U.S. oil exports
Number of GTA homes being taken over by lenders is skyrocketing
People who work with overextended real estate borrowers in the Toronto area say they’re busier than they’ve been in more than a decade. The number of homes that have been taken over by lenders under “power of sale” is up almost 60 per cent from the same time last year, according to new data.
Some in the sector are comparing the current climate to the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis.
Robert Marsiglio, a sales representative with Valery Real Estate, who keeps track of distressed real estate, said that searches of the Toronto Real Estate Board show at least 228 current active listings described as “power of sale” (or some variant) as of early September. That’s up 59 per cent from 143 in the same period last year.
Some say the legal system is buckling under the increased workload of power of sale business.
The power of sale process is not like a foreclosure: Canadian banks or lenders don’t typically end up owning a debtor’s home. However, in most cases, the way a lender secures the return of the money they are owed is through a court-approved sale of a mortgaged property. If there’s any money made in the sale above what the lender is owed, it’s returned to the seller (or their other creditors if there are other claims).
When the demand letters have been served and a power of sale process is under way, borrowers will often hear from someone like Medina Young, a law clerk at Fogler, Rubinoff LP. – which has such clients as Equitable Bank – who walks them through the next steps.
Ms. Young has also noted a larger number of working families among her files, people who might not previously have ended up facing power of sale unless a major job or health event intervened.
There’s also an increase in the number of investment properties facing power of sale.
Toronto accounted for 38 per cent of the power of sale properties in Mr. Marsiglio’s data, but fully half of those listings are for condominium apartments. In the GTA as a whole, condos made up 28 per cent of the power of sale listings. The problems may go even deeper, since some of the properties weighing on indebted homeowners haven’t even been built yet.
Ms. Young said that while it was once rare for a lender to record a loss on their power of sale, in the condo market, it’s becoming increasingly normal.
Canada’s Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy recorded 158,441 insolvencies of all types in 2009; in the seven months it has released data for in 2025 there have been 84,610, which is on pace to surpass 2024’s total of 143,483, if not quite rival 2009.
This weeks fun find
It was the hottest day of the year in New York City. Oddly, that wasn’t why I was half naked.
And it’s not why I was surrounded by nearly 100 bodies in equal or greater states of undress. We were all in a 175-degree sauna, where partial nakedness is not unusual. What was unusual was what we were all doing there: watching two artists perform an interpretive dance.
Welcome to the Aufguss USA Nationals, America’s first Aufguss World Masters event, a two-day competition held at Brooklyn’s Bathhouse. It was late June, and the nation’s best sauna experts had flown in to show off their skills in aufguss, a blend of dance, sport, theater, therapy, and aerodynamic manipulation so odd it could only come from Germany. I was witnessing, for lack of a more succinct description, competitive sauna–ing.
This is no fad. Or if it is one, it’s a growing one. Over 1,000 people had come out to watch the spectacle. An enormous (700-square-foot) “event sauna” had been custom built at Bathhouse to accommodate aufguss, complete with a sound and lighting system. It was the second and final day, and the winners would move on to the world championships in Italy, scheduled for the week of Sept. 14. The competition was the same day Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo faced off at the polls, and it was a showdown just as momentous, provided that you were extremely invested in European spa dancing.
It might look like Eurovision with linens, but aufguss, which has been practiced in Europe for at least a century, has its roots in the humble maintenance work of sauna masters. The magazine Spa Business defines the craft as “raising the temperature and controlling the wafting of the steam, heat and aromas via creative towel waving.” (The name aufguss comes from the German word for “infusion.”) Since hot air rises, not all seats in a sauna are created equal. “If you’re in a 175-degree sauna, the heat on the ceiling of that sauna is probably 200 degrees,” explains Bathhouse co-owner Travis Talmadge. Aufguss was developed to counter this thermal lift. “You use a towel to wave it and bring it down onto guests to bring more heat onto them and get them sweating even more.”
