Service areas
Most of what you would expect to change by city does not.
Same lenders, same rates, same stress test, same down payment rules across every municipality in Ontario. Three things genuinely differ — and they are worth knowing before you buy.
There is a lot of mortgage marketing built around locality, and most of it is empty. Nobody has a Vaughan rate or a Markham lender. Your file is priced on your income, your credit, your down payment and the property — not your postcode.
What does change is worth being precise about. Land transfer tax, which is dramatically different inside Toronto and identical everywhere else. Property tax, which is set municipally and affects what you qualify for because lenders count it in your debt service ratios. And the properties themselves — a condominium in Markham and a well-and-septic property north of Newmarket are underwritten in genuinely different ways.
Each page below covers what is actually different about buying there. Where nothing is different, it says so.
Richmond Hill
The home office. What being local genuinely changes about a mortgage, and what it does not.
Read more →Toronto
The Municipal Land Transfer Tax, both first-time buyer rebates, and what actually changes when you cross the city boundary.
Read more →Vaughan
Pre-construction and new-build financing — deposit structures, the long gap to closing, and the appraisal that happens at the end.
Read more →Markham
Condo and townhouse financing, what a status certificate does to an approval, and mortgages without a long Canadian credit history.
Read more →Aurora & Newmarket
Freehold and rural-edge properties: how wells, septic, acreage and outbuildings change which lenders will fund a purchase.
Read more →
Straight talk
Why there is no page for every town.
Plenty of mortgage sites carry a page for every municipality in the region, each one the same text with the name swapped. They exist to catch searches, not to tell you anything, and search engines have been discounting them for years.
The pages here exist where there is something genuinely different to say — a tax that applies in one city and nowhere else, a kind of property that changes which lenders will lend. Aurora and Newmarket share a page because, for mortgage purposes, they are the same place. If that stops being true, they will get separate pages then.
The licence is provincial, so the practical limit is Ontario. If your municipality is not listed, that is not a limitation — it just means there was nothing distinctive enough to write down. Call and ask.
Based in Richmond Hill. Serving Richmond Hill, Vaughan, Markham, Aurora, Newmarket, King, Whitchurch-Stouffville, East Gwillimbury and the wider GTA.