Note: I apologize for yesterday's post. It was rife with errors and incorrect analysis. I need some uninterupted sleep real bad as my six month old boy is keeping my wife and I up at night a bit and I am certain my lack of sleep is contributing to some dumb-dumb mistakes. I also think my personal frustrations about living in the Vancouver area and the markets in general are getting the better of me right now.
Moving on - Anonyposter has returned with scraped data in hand. Mohican has made a chart and both are here for your viewing pleasure. Our Anonyposter has scraped listing and price data for the entire City of Vancouver on October 2 and November 5 and now we can compare and use that data to our hearts content.
14 comments:
about the post yesterday: I learned something useful in the comments. It never would have come up if there was not discussion on how to properly measure earnings.
Your posts are always good to read mohican.
I commiserate with the sleep deprivation thing, babby solipsist is 9 months now, and it's just starting to get better. It's a very cool stage.
Interesting numbers. To me what really stands out is that a number like "-1.3% change" really hides a lot of what is going on. Some areas are really up and some are really down. Thanks Anonyposter and Mohican for the data. (Are #sales/area available too? If really low for a certain area it could explain some of the extreme price changes.)
Hang in there with the bambino. We didn't have a stretch of sleep >3hrs for the first 8 months, so I know how you feel.
Sales are not available as the data is directly scraped from the public MLS.ca website.
The small sample sizes in the smaller neighbourhoods makes the monthly asking price change statistic pretty useless. In larger neighbourhoods and in the city as a whole, I think the statistics are relevant.
This is for detached?
Nice display of humility. I think the best example of inexplicable pricing is downtown condos. A product that is mostly depreciation building that yields 2% or less in a low inflation environment. It is almost a mathematical certainty that returns into the future will be negative.
Sales are not available as the data is directly scraped from the public MLS.ca website.
Nicely done work by both anonyposter for scraping the data and Mohican for the chart. As I mentioned last time this was discussed, asking prices are likely overstated for two reasons:
1. Because they are asking prices.
2. Excessive asking prices stay on the market longer and are over represented, biasing average and median asking prices upwards.
On the other hand, asking prices are a better indicator going forward than sales prices which can be six weeks old (or more) since offer was accepted.
Hey Mohican,
How much do you know about our exposure to the sub prime? How much do you think the mess will impact our lending standards etc?
I am not sure if your expertise extends to this area.
Paul,
I am not expet but my husband was talking to our banker in Toronto. We have been friend for about 10 years. She said that she has never seen debt as high as this. She has never seen mortgages as high in her 30 year career.
She also said what is scary it is that it is the baby boomers who are heavily in debt and they are close to retirement. When they should be downsizing the are "upsizing" with 2nd properties and larger houses. It is all cheap credit.
She thinks it is going to be ugly.
The cheerleaders keep saying that we are not subject to sub-prime but we just have different names for it.
We were going to buy a house in the Uplands in Victoria almost $1.5 million with work to be done. The Bank was more than happy to lend us money. Lots of money! Even more than we asked.
My husband said he could not sleep at night owing that much money. We luckily did not buy the house and are staying put.
When I look at the cars in the parking lot at my kids school I am amazed. So many mercedes, Lexus, BMWs it is just crazy. She is in grade 5 now. It was not like that when she was in K and grade 1. Vctoria has not created any new industry here so I imagine the money is coming from cheap credit. There has not been an influx of young professionals. Companies have not set up shop here.
Something is driving this.
The cheerleaders keep saying that we are not subject to sub-prime but we just have different names for it.
Well it pretty well has to be the case. Our prices are THE highest in North America, yet our incomes are well down the list.
Our average payments as a percentage of income are much worse than the bubbliest U.S. metro.
As I have mentioned before, I think that the U.S. has more extremely marginal buyers, beyond that we have a much higher percentage of plain vanilla marginal buyers (ie. 40%+ DSR).
Freako, you said:
Our average payments as a percentage of income are much worse than the bubbliest U.S. metro.
I totally agree in concept that this must be true but I'm wondering where this info is coming from - did you read this somewhere?
I totally agree in concept that this must be true but I'm wondering where this info is coming from - did you read this somewhere?
Nope, straight deductive reasoning. I don't think there is any real due diligence among our research analysts and their talking heads. They just merrily conclude that Canada wide, "subprime" borrowing is low, so all must be well in all of Canada.
The problem is that they focus only on the numbers at the extreme, and don't look at the breadth of the problem.
It as if the one compared drug abuse among two groups. Group A has 5 heroin addicts and 95 clean individuals. Group B has no heroin addicts but 75 alcoholics. By this superficial logic, only group A has a substance abuse problem, so group B can party on without worries.
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