Fixed rates are moving up. Here’s what’s still on the sheet.

Fixed pricing has been drifting up for a few weeks now. One lender still has a three-year fixed special sitting below where the rest of the market is quoting — and a special is not a rate sheet. It’s a tranche of money the lender has set aside at a sharp price. When that tranche fills, the rate is gone.

I expect it to last until the end of next week. That is an expectation, not a commitment. Nobody at the lender has given me a date, and specials get pulled early when the money moves faster than they planned for. There is no grandfathering either. If your file is not already submitted, you do not get the rate.

If you are buying, renewing or refinancing, a pre-approval holds this rate for 60 days while you decide. It costs you nothing, and it is the only way to actually hold one of these.

Rates shown are as of August 28, 2026 and are subject to change or withdrawal without notice. On approved credit; not all applicants or properties will qualify. Insured (high-ratio) pricing requires the mortgage to qualify for default insurance, and restrictions apply including purchase price, amortization and property use. Conventional pricing applies where equity is 20% or more. Nothing here is an offer of credit or a commitment to lend. E.&O.E.

Olympic Mortgage Corporation

INSIDE A
LIVE FILE

What it actually looks like to work with me — a real client file, broken down line by line.

Most mortgage marketing tells you what a broker says they do.

I’d rather show you.

Below is a real email I sent to real clients — names, addresses, lenders and rates stripped out, everything else intact. They’re buying a new primary residence and pulling the down payment out of a rental they already own. Three properties in play, two of them without signed leases.

Here’s what that strategy looks like in practice.

Strategy 01

Structuring the purchase

Three decisions, and they interact.

One — how much. 80% loan-to-value. Conventional, no default insurance premium, maximum flexibility.

Two — the fixed / HELOC split. A HELOC revolves: pay it down, pull it back out, no penalty to break it. Fixed is cheaper but locked. Most people don’t need to pick one — they need a ratio. Someone with a renovation coming, or self-employment income that lands in lumps, should carry more HELOC. Someone who needs the payment nailed to the floor should carry more fixed. That’s a conversation, not a product.

Three — the lender is a consequence, not a starting point. One bank had a genuinely sharp three-year fixed and the rest of the market wasn’t close. A different bank had the best five-year variable — but no HELOC behind it. So the question was never “who has the best rate.” It was “which trade-off costs you less, given what you’re actually going to do with this property.”

Rates move weekly. What doesn’t move is knowing, on any given Tuesday, which lender is actually competitive and which one is quoting a number they have no real intention of winning with.

Strategy 02

Structuring the rental — the one that decides the deal

Four things stacked into one paragraph. Unpacking them:

The 65% ceiling is a rule, not a preference. You can borrow to 80% of value, but only 65% of it can sit in the revolving HELOC portion. The remaining 15% has to be a term mortgage. That’s regulation. No broker talks their way around it, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing.

Penalty risk should drive structure. If there’s any real chance this property sells inside the term, a closed fixed mortgage is an exit fee waiting to happen. HELOC money has no breakage penalty. Paying a slightly higher rate to preserve the option to leave is often the cheaper decision overall — and it’s a decision almost nobody makes deliberately, because almost nobody is told they have it.

Rentals price worse than primary residences. Sometimes. If a property can legitimately be qualified as a second home rather than a rental, the pricing improves, and I’ll always test that first. But there’s a trade: qualify it as a second home and the rent stops counting as income. On a file carrying this much property, they need that rental income to make the ratios work. So we take rental treatment on purpose, with our eyes open.

And then the part I actually like. Take the money as a HELOC now, and you can convert it to a fixed term later, whenever the rate suits you. You’re not re-qualifying and you’re not re-applying — you’re converting an approved facility on the lender’s standard conversion grid, at a time of your choosing rather than the calendar’s.

That’s not a trick. It’s just knowing how the machinery works, and setting the file up so the machinery works in your favour.

A lot of brokers will tell you they “work with over fifty lenders.” Often what that means is they work with the ones that accept a file through a portal and never speak to a bank underwriter in their lives.

I’m the other kind. We are deep with BMO, Scotiabank and TD — and we know the credit unions cold.

You don’t have to go from bank to bank. We’re a one-stop shop. And there’s no guessing with me either. No walking your credit bureau around town collecting inquiries while four people tell you four different things.

The line most people never see

For most Canadians, the entire outcome of a financing turns on one invisible line.

On one side: the bank approves you, and you get the cheapest money in the country.

On the other: the bank declines you, you fall into alternate or private lending, and the cost of your mortgage changes materially.

Almost nobody is told where that line sits until they’re already on the wrong side of it.

That line is where I do my best work.

Because knowing the banks cold isn’t only about getting bank approvals. It’s about knowing — early, and with confidence — when a bank is not going to do the deal. When the income won’t document. When the property type kills it. When the debt servicing simply doesn’t get there no matter how it’s presented.

The moment I know a bank won’t fund it, we stop wasting your time and go straight to the lender who will. Not shotgunning your file across town hoping something sticks. One move, to the right place.

And once we’re on the alternate or private side, the job becomes finding you the cheapest and best-structured money available there — with the shortest possible path back to bank pricing. Alternate lending should be a bridge, not a destination.

Execution

The unglamorous half — which is where files actually die

Strategy gets you the right structure at the right lender. Execution is what gets it funded. Back to that same email.

Documents, up front, in one batch

I’m telling them what the lender is going to ask for before the lender asks.

Bureaus have a shelf life. Paystubs have a shelf life. A file that was fully documented four months ago is a stale file today, and there is no version of this process where you get to skip that.

The line that matters is the last one. I’m not just listing documents — I’m telling them which one I think we can get waived, and why. Two years of T4s at the same employer is a stronger income story than a letter typed up by an office manager on Tuesday afternoon. Knowing which documents a particular lender will genuinely insist on, versus which ones they’ll flex on, is the difference between a five-day approval and a three-week grind.

Document requests that arrive in one batch at the start mean someone read your file. Document requests that trickle in over three weeks mean nobody did.

Your file, your way

Small thing. Matters more than you’d think. Some clients want a secure portal with a tidy checklist. Some want to photograph a paystub and send it to me at 9pm from the couch. Both are fine. The worst version of this process is the one where you’re fighting software instead of buying a house.

Where the down payment actually comes from

They aren’t writing a cheque out of savings. The down payment is being manufactured out of equity in property they already own — which means the lender now underwrites everything they own, not just what they’re buying.

Two of the rentals have no signed lease. That isn’t a dead end; it’s a technique. Most lenders will accept an appraiser’s opinion of economic market rent in place of a lease. And in a market where plenty of long-tenured tenants are paying well under market, market rent frequently qualifies you for more than the actual lease would.

Knowing that in advance is the difference between “we need leases, sorry” and “we’ll order the rent schedule with the appraisal.”

One more thing, since this is meant to be an honest look

There’s a line near the end of that email clients occasionally ask about: “We’ll do our best to compete on the market, but please let me know if you’re actively shopping anywhere else.”

I’m not asking for loyalty for its own sake. Lenders score brokers on how much of what we submit actually funds, and that score directly affects the pricing and the exceptions we can get — for you and for every other client on our desk. When the same file gets submitted by three different people, everybody’s score takes the hit, and the pricing gets worse for the next person in line.

So shop if you want. I’d just rather you tell me, so I can either beat it or tell you honestly that you’ve got a better deal than I can get. Both of those are useful answers.

Elsewhere

Thanks for having me back on the podcast

I sat down again with Adrian and Vince on the Victoria Real Estate Podcast, and it turned into one of the better conversations I’ve had about this market — what’s actually happening with pricing on the Island, where the qualifying math is biting people, and what buyers are getting wrong right now.

It’s worth an hour of your commute even if you’re not buying anything. They talk about Victoria specifically rather than national averages, which is most of the reason the national headlines feel so disconnected from what you see on the ground here.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Amazon Music — or straight from their site.

The client file described here has been genericized — names, property addresses, lender names and rates have been removed or altered. The rate specials shown above are current as of the date noted, are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and are not a rate quote, a commitment, or an offer of credit. Every file is underwritten on its own merits, on approved credit.

Olympic Mortgage Corporation, Victoria BC  |  BCFSA #145716