Forecasting Canadian mortgage rates

ABSTRACT

Mortgage rates are one of the important drivers of the housing market. While there is a literature looking at the pass-through effect from Central Bank rates to mortgage rates, there is less known about how useful Central Bank rates are for forecasting mortgage rates. This article uses a selection of models (ARIMA, ARIMAX, BATS, state space error, trend seasonal (ETS), Holt Winter, random walk, simple exponential smoothing (SES), OLS and VAR) to forecast Canadian 5-year conventional mortgage rates. Based on RMSE, regression-based approaches like ARIMAX or OLS that use Central Bank rates to forecast mortgage rates are preferred when it comes to forecasting Canadian mortgage rates 6 or 12 months into the future, respectively.

KEYWORDS:

• Forecasting
• mortgage rates
• bank rate
• Canada

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• E43
• E47
• R31

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.