Being a rate guy, two numbers jumped out at me this morning while reading Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s (CMHC) new Mortgage Consumer Survey.
- 88 per cent said they compare interest rates
- 33 per cent admit to using rate comparison websites
To the 12 per cent who skip the rate comparison ritual: Congratulations, you are precisely the customer lenders dream about between coffee breaks.
Few things pad a lender’s margins more than consumers who don’t shop around and simply sign on the dotted line.
Granted, some borrowers have too little principal or time remaining in their mortgage to care, or they have a product or relationship tying them to their bank, or they simply can’t qualify elsewhere so they just hope for the best.
For anyone else carrying a real balance, skipping rate comparisons is essentially writing your lender a thank-you cheque — to the tune of $1,431 per $300,000 borrowed, for every 10 basis points more you pay on a standard five-year term.
As for the second figure, the idea that only one in three borrowers consults rate comparison sites is genuinely puzzling, especially among prime borrowers who have every reason to look.
And that share has slid from 38 per cent the previous year, which is moving in the wrong direction.
I suspect the number is higher because rate sites dominate mortgage searches in Canada, and almost anyone capable of opening a browser uses the internet to research mortgages .
But, for argument’s sake, let’s assume these survey results are roughly accurate.
If so, then not enough Canadians are leveraging rate sites.
Here’s the thing…
Unless tracking mortgage pricing is your day job, there are only two ways to know where the true rate market is:
- Ask someone
- Check the internet
If you go the human route, that person had better be well-informed, monitor every rate with fanatical attention and possess the helpful quality of telling you the truth.
Many mortgage brokers fit that bill — particularly the ones who don’t push just a small stable of lenders.
As for asking a lender that sells only its own brand of mortgage, that’s a bit like asking a chef if their restaurant is the best in town.
The exception is if the lender you happen to contact genuinely has the sharpest terms and features at that precise moment. But I’d put that probability at one in 50 for most people, given all the competitors out there.
If you turn to the internet instead, the places you check matter enormously.
The most obvious places are rate comparison pages like Wowa, Ratehub or (since I work here) FP’s daily updated mortgage rates .
You can also dig through forums like Reddit or RedFlagDeals, browse broker websites, scroll social media or query AI chatbots, which CMHC says 16 per cent of mortgage shoppers now do.
A quick aside, that AI number is heading straight up. Among other reasons, more and more people will use AI agents to scour the net for the sharpest deals, which may reduce existing rate sites to data feeds rather than the final word on the lowest rates.
This will, without question, be the most significant shift in rate shopping since the arrival of the internet itself.
One wrinkle, however, is that some of the sharpest deals never see daylight.
Case in point: last week two brokers shared client quotes from a major bank pricing an uninsured three-year fixed at 3.79 per cent.
At the time, the lowest advertised offer in Canada for that same mortgage was 3.99 per cent, which itself was a spectacular rate.
The only way a customer could have landed that 3.79 per cent deal was to get an offer from the lender directly, which meant either calling them or being on their mailing list.
Of course, few borrowers have the time to dial every lender in the country, and for many, the potential 10-20 basis points in savings simply doesn’t justify the effort.
Looking beyond the rate…
Today, comparing offers on rate sites should be the bare minimum research for well-qualified borrowers, even though CMHC’s numbers suggest only one in three Canadians actually bother.
But that’s merely a starting point, and where you compare matters more than ever.
Comparison sites, brokers, forums and AI chatbots each see a different slice of the market, and no single source has it all.
In fact, the big rate sites explicitly avoid showing all the best deals because they don’t get paid by every lender.
In any event, once you’ve narrowed the field to a shortlist of offers, there’s still more homework to do.
That’s because the best rate isn’t necessarily the lowest borrowing cost . So many other things can add to your effective borrowing expense, like bad advice, restrictive contractual terms, penalties and fees.
On top of all that, the lowest number on a screen isn’t always the lowest figure a lender will quote. Haggling still works if you invest the effort, and that’s not something the average rate site supports.
Robert McLister is a mortgage strategist, interest rate analyst and editor of MortgageLogic.news. You can follow him on X at @RobMcLister.
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