We just moved to Canada — can we buy a home in Ontario yet?

Your immigration status decides this, not your income

The first question is not what a family can afford. It is what they are permitted to buy, and the answer comes from immigration status rather than from a bank statement.

Canada's federal prohibition applies to non-Canadians. Permanent residents and citizens sit outside it entirely, so a family that landed holding permanent residence is not restricted by it and does not need an exemption from it. Several categories of temporary resident are exempt as well, including some work permit holders and some students, each on conditions worth reading rather than assuming.

Ontario charges a separate tax on some purchases by foreign nationals, and it carries its own exemption list which does not match the federal one. The two rules are independent, and qualifying under one says nothing about the other.

This is also the part of the process that is cheapest to get right. Confirming a status category costs a conversation. Discovering it at the wrong moment costs a deposit.

Your credit history did not travel with you

A credit file built over fifteen years in India, the Philippines or the United Kingdom does not transfer into the Canadian bureaus. On the day a family lands, the Canadian file is empty, and an empty file is not the same as a bad one — but a lender cannot read either of them.

The clock starts the day the first Canadian account reports. That is why the useful work here is small, dull and early: a secured card used and cleared every month, a phone account in your own name rather than a relative's, rent reported where a landlord participates in a programme that allows it.

Months of ordinary repayment is the entire mechanism. There is no product that compresses it and no way to buy the time back at the offer stage, which is the single strongest argument for starting this in the first weeks after landing rather than in the month a family decides to buy.

Lenders ask where the money came from, not only how much

A down payment has to be traced. A lender will want to see the money arrive and sit, and will ask about anything that appears without an explanation — which is a documentation question rather than a suspicion, and it is answered easily by anyone who kept the paperwork.

Money sent from India, or from anywhere else, is ordinary and expected. What matters is that the trail is complete: which account it left, how it was transferred, whose money it was before it moved, and what it is once it arrives.

That last point is the one families most often leave vague. A transfer from parents is either a gift or a loan, and the two are read differently — a loan is a debt a lender will count against the file, a gift is not. Deciding which it is, and saying so consistently, is part of preparing the down payment rather than an afterthought at signing.

The mortgage conversation comes before the agent, not after

Newcomer mortgage programmes exist, and they are not one product. Different lenders and different insurers set their own conditions on status, on how long a borrower has been in Canada, on income documentation and on the size of the down payment, and those conditions are where a newcomer file is actually decided.

A mortgage professional reads that file first and says what is possible. An agent then works inside the answer. Done in the other order, a family spends weekends viewing a price bracket that was never available to them, which is a demoralising way to learn a number.

Robin Patel's practice is to have this conversation in Gujarati, Hindi or English before a first showing is booked, because the answer changes what is worth looking at.

There is a real case for renting the first year

For some newcomer families the honest recommendation is to wait. A year of Canadian income, a year of credit history and a year of living in a region before committing to a part of it are all worth something, and none of them can be bought.

That is not a reason to delay the preparation. Credit, documentation and the status question are all work that can be finished during a rental year, so that the family arrives at the decision with a file already built rather than starting it then.

For other families buying sooner is right, usually where status is settled, income is documented and the down payment is in place. Neither answer is automatically the correct one, and the point of asking early is to find out which applies.

The order that actually works

Almost every avoidable delay a newcomer family runs into comes from taking these steps out of sequence. The order below is not a checklist of everything involved in a purchase; it is the part that has to happen before a purchase is realistic.

• Confirm your status category under the federal prohibition and under the Ontario tax, and get the answer in writing.
• Open the first Canadian credit accounts and start using them properly, in the first weeks rather than the first month of house hunting.
• Assemble the down payment where a lender can see it, with the transfer trail intact and gift or loan decided.
• Take the file to a mortgage professional and find out what is actually available to it.
• Bring an agent in to work inside that answer — including, where it is the right call, the answer that says wait.