06/01/2026
The headline reads like bad news. It isn't — not if you've been doing this right.
Effective June 8, 2026, CMHC is raising its expense benchmarks, which means the agency keeps tightening the screws on liquidity for borrowers.
Underwriting more conservative expenses lowers your supportable loan amount, full stop.
A lot of people are going to read that as the market getting harder. Here's the more useful way to read it:
If your deal only worked at extreme leverage — if it needed 95% to pencil — then the financing was carrying the deal. The asset wasn't. And a deal that only survives because the lender is willing to stretch was never really a deal. It was a bet on someone else's risk appetite holding steady.
That appetite is shrinking. It will keep shrinking. So the question worth asking isn't "how do I find the leverage to make this work?" It's "does this work on fundamentals?"
Real returns in multifamily come from the boring stuff: buying at a basis that makes sense, NOI you can actually grow, expenses you understand and can control, and a rent roll that holds up when the assumptions get tested. None of that depends on CMHC's posture in any given quarter.
The investors who do well over the next cycle won't be the ones who found the most aggressive financing. They'll be the ones who never needed it.
