Mortgaged Houses a ‘Legacy’ of Economic Problems

Michael Shaw

A sign that the economy is sluggish can be seen by a flip of the pages of local newspapers. Weekly, there are long lists of houses and properties on the auction block since property owners are unable to meet respective mortgage payments and banks end up foreclosing on their accounts. The media asked Scotiabank’s Managing Director Shaw to shed some light on how that is playing out at the Bank.

Michael Shaw, Managing Director, Scotiabank

“That is almost like a legacy question cause the truth is that those houses that are up for sale, we are not seeing that level of default currently. What you are seeing is I would say, houses that have been in the market for greater than five years that have now gone through to the auction state. What I would want to assure you is that our stance on it is that we will give the costumer every single opportunity to make good prior to taking that step because we know home ownership is something that is really dare to the heart of a costumer; it is a major investment that they will make and it offers certainly not to take somebody’s house. It is absolute last resort that we would take that stance.”