Hodge Podge for the long weekend.First a tribute to Canada. Canada, for all its faults, is a pretty darn nice place to live. Its mostly free, mostly clean, mostly peaceful, and delightfully uninteresting in most respects!
Next, a local real estate market inventory update courtesy of realtor Rob Chipman. Inventory is following an almost identical path to last year with the significant difference of being 30% higher! July is the month when we should start to see the beginning of the fall inventory build up and I expect the Chipman area will break 13,000 for the first time ever in July sometime.
Finally, the June Real Estate market information should be out on Tuesday from the REBGV and FVREB. What do you think it will indicate? I expect marginally higher prices from May, higher inventory than last year and lower sales than last year. Months of inventory should continue rising but all in all no big surprises. The real action will probably start in the fall.
12 comments:
By 'real action' I mean stagnant listings with big price cuts. Realtors start complaining about the market's softness. The death, divorce, transfer crowd starts to feel the pinch of being unable to sell their house. We start hearing stories of young first time buyers feeling the financial pinch - maybe even foreclosures because of job losses. By Christmas time we might even start hearing about bad lending practices in Canada (gasp!) and poor credit quality borrowers being unable to make their payments.
From Victoria:
Many properties here in the million plus range are lowering their prices by $100,000 $200,000 and $300,000. One property ($3 million) just lowered it price $500,000.
The Victoria RE agents are still spinning the tale that every wealthy person in the whole wide world wants to live here U.S., Europe and Canada (most notably Alberta).
The high-end homes are just sitting. I have friends who have had their lovely home on the market for 80 days and only 2 people came to see it. Another person had an open house for their $1.5 million house and not one person turned up. Some homes have been sitting for almost 9 months.
We have decided not to put anymore money into Victoria real estate. (my husband had been an analyst on Bay Street for many years and is convinced of a crash). Our agent was still trying to tell us that property can only keep going up here and when we disagree with him he was almost angry that we would even think such a thing.
Things often start at the top.
Here's a transcript of Bill Moyers interviewing Gretchen Morgenstern of the NYTs regarding the US sub-prime meltdown.
"Hold onto your hat. It's going to be an interesting summer."
Seattle listings took a huge jump in May, from 16,295 to 18,546. A good lesson for Vancouver, given that we are geographically close, and have similar population size. For perspective, they had current levels our levels at the end of February. Four short months, and inventory is 50% higher.
Reuters:
Real Estate: Two-thirds of investment managers showed little enthusiasm about the Canadian real estate sector. "There has been so much publicity regarding the glut of supply and high-risk mortgage lending problems in the U.S.," said Hicks, "and with the strong likelihood of higher financing costs, both south and north of the border, managers are more bearish about Canadian real estate."
Seattle listings took a huge jump ... A good lesson for Vancouver
Yeah but Seattle just has Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, Costco, etc.
We have... drum roll... The Olympics!
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. I just had to give my Dad a pep talk. Sellers remorse, if you can believe it. My parents just sold their extra house for more than double what they bought it for back in 2001.
Mom, who is delighted and also a bit of a bear, joined me in the pep talk. We finally convinced Dad that the only way to have increased the selling price would have involved risks of sunk money in renovations and carrying costs. Never mind the bigger risk of a crash in the meantime.
Dad doesn't usually obsess on money, as he has enough of it and really isn't very materialistic. Its more about worrying that he was somehow suckered into a deal that wasn't the best he could get.
Most importantly, especially if you came out ahead, DON'T LOOK BACK!!!
1. hadenough:
Any idea as to how recreational properties are currently doing on Vanc Island?
2. DON'T LOOK BACK.
Great movie. If you haven't seen it, check it out.
And, patiently waiting, great advice.
RENTAH,
I have no idea how vacation properties are doing. It would love to know.
The RE agents are still spinning the storey that it is the Albertans that are keeping the market this high. However on an earlier blog someone had the stats for out of town buyers and I think it was pretty small like only 2% from Alberta for all of BC.
I would love to know this.
I believe it was macchiato aka bellagio who had these stats. May have been betamax. Google may still have VHB cached. I hope so.
In any case, anecdotally, I would suspect that there IS a strong Alberta influence. We have looked at interior waterfront for a few years, and more than a few were pointed out to me as bought by Albertans. And certainly no shortage of Alberta plates on cars parked on recreational property.
"Google may still have VHB cached."
One can always use the wayback machine too.
hadenough:
http://tinyurl.com/s239p
"Based on data compiled by Landcor, a B.C. real estate research firm, Albertans accounted for just 2.4 per cent of the $48.5-billion worth of residential real estate sold in B.C. last year, and just 2.6 per cent of the total number of units sold."
Last year is 2005 in the above
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