thehousingbubble@gmail.com
Blog

At Times It Felt Like The Boom Would Never End

A report from Global News on Canada. “An over-abundance of houses for sale in the Edmonton area could mean slower sales and lower prices until well into next year, an economist tells Global News. Prices have dropped, too, with single-family homes selling for an average of $421,715 in November,  according to the association — 4.55 per cent lower than a year before.”

“Raemonde Bezenar has had her St. Albert condominium on the market for nine months. Despite lowering her price twice, the top-floor corner suite remains empty. ‘I want to find the right owners, the right family — or single family — to be able to come here and literally enjoy this place as much as I do,’ Bezenar said. ‘I love this place.'”

From CTV News. “After prices and sales climbed across the Lower Mainland in 2015 and 2016, the B.C. and federal governments stepped in to attempt to cool the market. In the past nine months, sales have slowed and prices have curbed their meteoric rise.”

“Things began to cool in the spring of this year, said Fraser Valley Real Estate Board president John Barbisan. ‘It was like a tap turned off,’ he said. ‘It’s as if all the buyers got together in a hall one night and decided nobody’s going to make an offer anymore.'”

“Government policies have helped move the pendulum, but it was more or less inevitable, and global housing markets are also slowing down, said Steve Saretsky, a Vancouver real estate agent. People are quick to criticize the stress test and new provincial taxes while forgetting how easy regulators have gone on the housing market for years, he added.”

“‘Everyone in the world talks about how indebted Canadian households are. There’s no question that it’s definitely been a pretty lenient borrowing spree over the last 15, 20 years,’ he said. ‘Now, all of a sudden everybody’s upset because the punch bowl’s been taken away. But parties don’t go on forever.'”

From CBC News. “Housing sales in Hamilton and Burlington dropped 17 per cent compared to the same month last year, according to the Realtor’s Association of Hamilton-Burlington. Some parts of West Hamilton, said CMHC Senior Market Analyst Anthony Passarelli, saw some areas outperforming on sales, but underperforming on prices. ‘It’s because there’s so much inventory in that area relative to the number of sales,’ he said.”

From Troy Media. “A report released on Wednesday by ATB Financial’s Economics & Research Team says Alberta’s major cities are awash in new houses with few people eager to call them home. The last time there was this much oversupply was during the financial crisis of 2008.”

“‘According to Statistics Canada, the number of completed but unabsorbed homes in Calgary reached 889 in October. This figure represents the number of new homes sitting vacant with no binding agreement made to buy or sell during the course of the month. Vacant housing in Calgary was 53 per cent higher in October than the same month last year. This is the highest that vacancy levels have been for more than 13 years,’ said ATB.”

“‘The level of new housing inventory reached a new high in Alberta’s capital. In October, the number of unabsorbed homes reached 1,251 in Edmonton. This number was 55 per cent higher than October of 2017 and 10 per cent higher than Edmonton’s previous high reached in August of this year.'”

The Estevan Mercury. “There were years in which there weren’t any vacancies in the Estevan market, at least not among the registered units. Bachelor suites in which you’re sharing a bathroom with four other people? There were none. One and two-bedroom apartments? Forget about it. Houses for rent? Nope.”

“And the rental rates were insane. There was a time in which Estevan was home to the highest rent in the country. Higher than Vancouver or Toronto. Higher than other oil boom markets like Calgary, Edmonton and Fort McMurray.”

“But the days of Estevan having the lowest rental vacancy rate and the highest average rent are long gone. And while the housing supply never caught up with the demand during the boom, there were a lot of new rental units that were constructed in the first half of this decade.”

“At times it felt like the boom would never end, even though we knew it would.”

Related Posts
This Post Has 22 Comments

  1. ‘There was a time in which Estevan was home to the highest rent in the country. Higher than Vancouver or Toronto’

    Things can change, and sometimes it changes fast. Look at Sydney or Hong Kong.

  2. ‘the number of completed but unabsorbed homes in Calgary reached 889 in October’

    There’s 3,400 of these in Orange County.

    1. “The Fed had losses of $66.5 billion on its securities holdings on Sept. 30, if it marked them to market…”

      “if it marked them to market”

      Which it doesn’t. So don’t worry, the member banks will still get their dividend.

  5. “Things began to cool in the spring of this year, said Fraser Valley Real Estate Board president John Barbisan. ‘It was like a tap turned off,’ he said. ‘It’s as if all the buyers got together in a hall one night and decided nobody’s going to make an offer anymore.’”

    It’s like all the Chinese RE money laundering operations got shut down, all at the same time…

  6. “It was like a tap turned off,” he said.

    Haha… phuc’d borrowers are up to their eye-teeth in debt and barely able to pay the interest fees alone.

    1. Sad what is happening

      It’s for the better jdog. What is sad is the decades of full throttle credit expansion that has made a few very rich and the rest significantly poorer. The end of that looting spree is a very happy thing.

  9. Bitcoin Investors Lied to Themselves to Justify Mania’s Prices
    The cryptocurrency boom found value where there wasn’t any.
    By Matthew A. Winkler
    December 13, 2018, 1:00 AM PST

    Every crypto enthusiast had a method for justifying Bitcoin’s ever-climbing price in 2017. They badly needed one: Bitcoins don’t pay interest like bonds or generate profits like companies, so it takes some mental gymnastics to come up with a valuation measure. For example, some say its price should be based on the value of the transactions moving through the network.

    It’s worth remembering that this isn’t the first time investors reached for new ways of calculating value. Remember “cash earnings”? During the dot-com boom of the 1990s, investors and analysts focused on a company’s operating cash flow per share, or other alternative measures, when conventional earnings didn’t give them the answers they were looking for.
    …

  10. https://confoundedinterest.net/2018/12/12/house-prices-as-an-example-of-fed-risk-mispricing-shillers-the-housing-boom-is-already-gigantic-how-long-can-it-last/
    Anthony B. Sanders – Confounded Interest – 18-12-12
    House Prices As An Example Of Fed Risk Mispricing (Shiller’s The Housing Boom Is Already Gigantic. How Long Can It Last?)

    “Did The Fed help misprice risk assets like housing? Of course!”

    There’s a link to NYT article by Robert Shiller, who (somehow) fails to notice the elephant in the room and to place blame squarely on the Fed, where it belongs. This guy won a Nobel Prize in economics (insert face plant here). This is the kind of drivel I expect from the NYT, but now it looks like even Shiller has sold out. Fake news. In any case, whether anyone besides this blog reports it or not, HB 2.0 is popping and the result isn’t going to be pretty, esp. when commensurate with stock and bond bubbles bursting. Nice job Fed. John Law would be proud!

    “The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.” – Winston Churchill

    Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
    Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
    All the King’s horses, And all the King’s men
    Couldn’t put Humpty together again!

  11. ‘I want to find the right owners, the right family — or single family — to be able to come here and literally enjoy this place as much as I do,’ Bezenar said. ‘I love this place.’”

    Right, so you expect to not only find a Greater Fool, but you also expect them to go along with your monetization of the great love you have for your unique and special condo.

    Good luck with that, Raemonde.

    1. ‘I want to find the right owners, the right family — or single family — to be able to come here and literally enjoy this place as much as I do,’

      I tried to vett this greedbags address to see if she is a investor or actually lived in that airbox. No luck but from the video you can see it’s empty, not even staged. She comes off to me like she really believes her shack is different from the glut of other shacks and the next knife catcher that buys it would be lucky or privelidged in some way.

    1. +1

      Condo’s / apartments are by no means a “house”. They are more a membership with a down payment for the “priveledge” to reside in. HOA’s and the boards that go along with an airbox take away that “ownership” feeling you get.

      1. To be fair, the Edmonton article makes a good distinction between single-family homes and attached condos. But the major MSM outlets don’t. Which is why we get ridiculous figures like 4000 “homes” built in some major city.

        1. Home is where the heart is. It could be a mega-mansion, or a patch of dirt under a bridge. So it’s a fair call to call a condo a home.

          1. Fair to the average Joe, yes. But always emotional manipulation or otherwise misleading wherever the word is used by the REIC.

  13. Snip from first article:

    “There’s an expectation gap between the amount of money a person can borrow and the amount of money that a person is willing to sell their home for,” Thompson said.

    Well that seems like a bit of a problem… lower your dream price greedbag

Comments are closed.