Over 40% of first-time home buyers in Canada can't afford a house without their parents' help, report suggests

A Bank of Montreal report suggests first-time home buyers are increasingly turning to the 'Bank of Mom and Dad'

The bank also found that 42 per cent of current home-owners surveyed said they were looking for family help with the purchase. Their average budget was $473,000 and their average downpayment was $123,214.

The BMO report is based on online interviews with a random sample of 2,007 people aged 18 years or more between Feb. 24 and March 5.

The polling industry’s professional body, the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error as they are not a random sample and therefore are not necessarily representative of the whole population.

Prices in Canada have been rising since 2009, resisting regulators’ efforts to cool the market by restricting credit. In Toronto and Vancouver, values have surged as much as 56 per cent in six years. Now as the European Central Bank’s bond buying helps drive down rates to near-record lows in Canada, the housing market is poised to ascend even higher.

Re/Max, the country’s largest residential real estate agency, raised its forecast for home price growth to 3 per cent from 2.5 per cent last week because transactions and values were so high in the first three months of this year. In March, housing sales rallied 4.1 per cent, the most in 10 months.

Toronto home sales increased 11 per cent to more than 8,000 transactions in March over the prior year, according to the Canadian Real Estate Association. Prices in the country’s most populous city jumped 10 per cent to about $601,500.

In Vancouver, Canada’s most expensive home market, sales soared 53 per cent and the average cost to buy a home rose 11 per cent to $870,000.

With files from Bloomberg