Barudak posted:

Title Insurance exists but works a little differently; by taking out every single official to dinner as many times as you can and showing up at their weddings and spring festivals with red pockets and gifts from the states you can reduce the odds of losing your house and possibly gain the ability to steal your neighbors when it suits you.

Rime posted:

So basically our banks are sitting on vast amounts of thin air, moreso than the US at the height of their bubble, and without the largest economy on earth to bail them out?

quote:

Canadian housing starts beat. 187.3K, expected 178.5K.

Jumpingmanjim posted:

Cultural Imperial posted:

These arguments that housing is expensive because supply is constrained are mostly nonsense disseminated by people whose self interest is closely related to FIRE. Density and geography have limited impact on price. The single largest contributor to high prices is the availability or expansion of credit.

quote:

If lower oil prices are as bad for Canada’s economy as rate-cutting Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz insists, the central bank might consider assessing the risks to the economy in a world where constraining carbon emissions becomes less of an abstract notion and more of a daily reality. For a petro-economy such as Canada’s, the financial risks associated with the pending battle against climate change are much greater than any cyclical downturn in oil prices.

etalian posted:

Also the that argument that the amazing local economy of places like Melbourne or Vancouver justify the big prices, even though they have less economic production than Houston.

Reverse Centaur posted:

I've never heard anyone argue that Vancouver has a good economy. We've got sea ports and sci-fi tv shows.

Cultural Imperial posted:

Really. You've never heard about people arguing how Vancouver's got a healthy vibrant tech scene with Hootsuite leading the vanguard of future tech millionaires along with D-wave, General Fusion and all those other companies writing the Next Great Food App.

My brother in law who works for Hootsuite tells me that the hottest thing in Vancouver that everyone is clambering to work for is some start up writing an internet messaging app.

quote:

Price gap between condos, houses swells to record level

For many first-time homebuyers, condominiums have been the easiest way to get a foothold into the housing market, a pit stop on the way to a dream home.

But a flood of new high-rise condos and fierce bidding wars for urban detached houses has caused a widening gulf between the price of condos and houses, which last year reached a record high.

In December the average price gap between a condo and a single-family house in the resale market of Canada’s four major cities, Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal, hit $320,000, according to data from Brookfield RPS prepared for The Globe and Mail. It has more than doubled in the past decade as the average resale price of a house in urban centres grew 90 per cent, while the price of a condo grew by just 48 per cent.

The discrepancy is starkest in Vancouver, where the average resale house price has shot up 120 per cent since 2005 to $1.1-million, while condo prices have risen by 50 per cent. The gap is smaller, but growing, in markets like Toronto and Calgary.

The causes are predictable. The supply of new listings for urban houses, has followed “an almost uninterrupted downward trend” for several years, said Shaun Hildebrand, senior vice-president of condo research firm Urbanation. That has been driven partly by a lack of newly built homes in urban centres and also by the fact that existing homeowners have been hesitant to sell in case there’s nothing to buy.

On the other hand are the rising number of new condo developments, driven in large part by a push among policy makers to boost density and curb urban sprawl.

But the price gap has profound implications, both for new buyers trying to find their way into the housing market without breaking the bank and for cities struggling to find the right mix of affordable housing.

Increasingly, the price gap between houses and condos reflects the fact that the two appeal to entirely different buyers, with investor-owned condos mainly serving the rental market as young families bid up the prices of detached homes. Even Calgary, which traditionally has had plenty of room to sprawl, has seen the shift toward condo buildings featuring bachelor units and no parking.

The glut of new rental housing has convinced many potential condo buyers to rent instead, driving down the demand for condos.

“There isn’t that same sense of urgency as there once was to get into marketplace because the costs are actually comparatively lower to rent than to buy,” said Mr. Hildebrand.

Meanwhile, the trend toward basement rental suites has made it easier for homebuyers to afford the massive mortgages on their houses, while also competing directly with condos on the rental market.

Despite a trend toward high-density city living, for many Canadians the ideal home is still the detached house, which is why the prospect of losing out on a dream house has become a far more emotional than missing out on a great condo, said Cory Raven, managing broker at Re/Max in Vancouver. The chances that a similar unit in the same building will eventually hit the market are pretty good, while the chance of finding the same renovated house nearby great parks and schools is slim to none.

Some industry officials say the slowdown in condo prices has been good for the market because it has driven out speculative investors looking to buy preconstruction units and then flip them a year later for a huge profit. Today’s condo investors are more often looking to make their money long-term on rental income rather than price appreciation.

“We’re okay with prices in the condo market not climbing as fast as low-rise because it adds some stability into the marketplace,” said Paul Golini Jr., executive vice-president of Empire Communities, which builds both low-rise and high-rise developments in Southern Ontario. “If the price of condos were increasing exponentially, then the land would be increasing exponentially. It’s easy to get caught in that vicious circle of price increases.”

Yet in the rush to encourage urban intensification, cities like Toronto are now struggling to find the right mix of affordable housing to serve an influx of new residents from other provinces or countries.

“One could reasonably make the case that some of the [policy] incentives in place have taken us too far in terms of the shrinking diversity of housing choices,” said Toronto-Dominion Bank deputy chief economist Derek Burleton.

He worries policy makers are focusing too much on development around existing transit corridors, rather than building a more comprehensive transit system that could help unlock new land on which to build a better mix of housing.

By encouraging more high-rise projects, cities haven’t necessarily succeeded in stopping suburban sprawl. In some cases, they have only pushed it farther away.

The fastest-growing communities in Canada, according to the latest Statistics Canada census, are far-flung suburbs like Milton and Stouville, Ont. as well as Squamish, B.C., which sit nearly an hour outside their respective urban cores of Toronto and Vancouver. They have been growing at a far faster rate than the cities they serve as young families move further afield in search of affordable detached homes.

“There’s a little catchphrase that we came up with in the industry: Drive until you qualify,” Mr. Golini said. “You’re driving further away from the city core until you hit the number that allows you to qualify for that price.”

But some say the tide is slowly turning. Builders are increasingly turning away from purely high-rise condo developments and toward mid-rise and townhouse developments in a bid to create more affordable family-friendly housing in the urban core. Changes to Ontario’s building code last month legalizing six-storey wood-frame buildings, which are cheaper than steel and concrete, should also help add mix of new, more affordable low-rise housing.

In some cases condo dwellers are choosing to move up within the condo market rather than fighting bidding wars for houses in the city. The demand for bigger condos is helping drive up the price of units in older buildings in Toronto, which have traditionally traded at a discount to new builds, Mr. Hildebrand said.

At Yonge and Eglinton, in the heart of Toronto’s uptown, Menkes Developments Ltd. is building its first condo project directed to young families. In the Eglinton, which is slated to open in 2018, at least 10 per cent of the units will be family-friendly three-bedrooms and the building will also have a dedicated playroom for kids.

Some buyers are now looking at condos as a long-term family home rather than a stop on the way to a detached house, said developer Alan Menkes. But the shift is happening slowly.

“We’re going to try to do more family condominiums, but the market is going to determine what we can build,” he said. “We don’t want to build things that the market doesn’t want.”

Even for the younger generation of homebuyers trend toward settling down in a condo has been painstakingly slow, meaning the gap between condo and houses is destined to only get bigger in the coming years.

“There is a generation that finds it completely normal to live in a condo and not have any aspiration to buy a home,” Re/Max’s Mr. Raven says. “But they still have parents who they’’ve got to go to dinner with on Sunday and those parents are telling them: ‘You have to buy a house, you have to buy a house.’ ”

quote:

Time to gauge oil slump’s impact on Canada's housing market

Several high-profile statistical reports will provide an update on the state of Canada’s housing market this week, giving Canadians a clearer picture of the damage wrought so far by the oil shock.

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.’s monthly count of housing starts is set for release Monday morning, providing a glimpse into whether the recent economic turmoil has landed on the doorstep of home builders. That will be followed by a pair of key reports on home prices on Thursday: the Teranet-National Bank index for resales and Statistics Canada’s price index for newly built housing.

Economists expect that housing starts slowed a hair in January, to an average estimated rate of about 178,000 annualized, from December’s 180,300.

Starts have declined considerably since the middle of last year, when they were near 200,000; at a 180,000 pace, they are probably a bit below the annual rate of household formation in Canada, suggesting a modest contraction of supply as the country’s housing market inches toward a long-overdue moderation.

(However, December and January are historically the two slowest months for housing starts anyway, owing to unfavourable construction weather.)

But economists say there is a danger that the January number could come in much lower than expected, given the slow time of year and the impact of the oil shock on key markets, especially in Alberta.

“We think the balance of risks lies toward the downside, given the collapse in the price of oil, which represents a major headwind for commodity intensive regions of the country,” Toronto-Dominion Bank said in a report Friday.

Prices are still stubbornly high, with overvaluation across Canada estimated by some experts to be as much as 20 per cent, a conspicuous and continuing risk to the Canadian economy.

Still, they have shown signs of cooling in recent months. The Teranet index declined on a monthly basis in both November and December, though growth for 2014 as a whole, at 4.9 per cent, was the greatest in three years.

The new-housing price index has inched ahead by 0.1 per cent in each of the past three months, but its annual growth rate of 1.7 per cent is near its historical lows.

Economists expect the oil shock to be a mixed blessing for Canada’s housing market – or, more precisely, a starkly geographically divergent one. Regions that are highly exposed to the energy business could be in for a rough ride in the coming months, while regions that aren’t so beholden to the oil industry are expected to benefit from the lower interest rates that the Bank of Canada delivered to counter oil’s drag on the Canadian economy.

Yet so far, the jury is out as to just how severe the impact of oil’s dramatic fall has been. While sinking oil prices have certainly hurt the Canadian dollar, economic indicators released last week suggested the broader economy may be holding up better than expected.

Friday’s data on the labour market – whose health is a key driver of housing demand – showed surprisingly strong job growth in January, especially in oil-rich Alberta, where major energy companies have been announcing spending and staff cuts.

Meanwhile, residential building permits held steady nationally in December, and rose by nearly 5 per cent in Alberta, suggesting the oil shock hasn’t convinced builders to backpedal from their construction plans. Not yet, anyway.

But the numbers out of the Calgary Real Estate Board last week told a much darker tale: Home sales in the country’s oil capital plunged nearly 40 per cent in January compared with a year earlier, to their lowest levels in five years, while new listings spiked 37 per cent as panicked home owners rushed to sell.

The sales were 35 per cent below the 10-year average, a dramatic fall for what had been one of the country’s hottest housing markets.

The situation was very different in the country’s two other residential real estate hotbeds, Toronto and Vancouver, where, in the absence of heavy oil-industry exposure, the recent cut in interest rates promises even more favourable mortgage conditions for buyers.

Vancouver’s home sales jumped 8.7 per cent in January from a year earlier, while the average price for a single-family detached home rose to a record $1.01-million. In Toronto, home sales rose 6.1 per cent in January from a year earlier, while prices increased 4.9 per cent.

“Lower mortgage rates won’t prevent home sales and prices falling sharply in regions directly hit by the slump in oil prices,” David Madani, Canada economist for Capital Economics, said in a report last week. “While they might support housing activity in other key markets, we fear that this will only fuel greater overvaluation, higher household debt and more overbuilding.“

Cultural Imperial posted:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/repo...rticle22853195/


8.7% roflmao

what in gently caress

etalian posted:

Commodity exposed provinces will probably get bubble burst first, other regions like GTA/Vancouver will have a longer bubble life before the inevitable happens with them too.

Cultural Imperial posted:

Bold prediction: re in markets like Toronto and Vancouver will not go down until interest rates increase. Only then we'll start to see people first default on line of credit, second to mortgages.

Timeline: 5 years from now.

Furnaceface posted:

Didnt it only take 2-3 years for the biggest bubble cities in the USA to get hit? And thats with a way more robust economy than Canada.

I still really enjoy my dad comparing Canada's bubble to a game of Jenga, since you really dont see the holes and weak spots in the structure until youre well into the game and everyone seems pretty content that they can just keep building it up Up UP until its too late.

FrozenVent posted:

They passed because the address had "4" in it

quote:

The recent surge in oil prices is just a “head-fake,” and oil as cheap as $20 a barrel may soon be on the way, Citigroup said in a report on Monday as it lowered its forecast for crude.

Despite global declines in spending that have driven up oil prices in recent weeks, oil production in the U.S. is still rising, wrote Edward Morse, Citigroup’s global head of commodity research. Brazil and Russia are pumping oil at record levels, and Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran have been fighting to maintain their market share by cutting prices to Asia. The market is oversupplied, and storage tanks are topping out.

A pullback in production isn’t likely until the third quarter, Morse said. In the meantime, West Texas Intermediate Crude, which currently trades at around US$52 a barrel, could fall to the $20 range “for a while,” according to the report. The U.S. shale-oil revolution has broken OPEC’s ability to manipulate prices and maximize profits for oil-producing countries.

“It looks exceedingly unlikely for OPEC to return to its old way of doing business,” Morse wrote. “While many analysts have seen in past market crises ’the end of OPEC,’ this time around might well be different,” Morse said.

Citi reduced its annual forecast for Brent crude for the second time in 2015. Prices in the $45-$55 range are unsustainable and will trigger “disinvestment from oil” and a fourth-quarter rebound to $75 a barrel, according to the report. Prices this year will likely average $54 a barrel.

West Texas Intermediate crude slid 46% last year as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries resisted calls to cut supply as it competed for market share against U.S. drillers pumping at the fastest rate in more than three decades. There will be an oversupply of about 2 million barrels a day in the first half of 2015, Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said in an interview on state TV Feb. 4.

“Not only is the market oversupplied, but the consequent inventory build looks likely to continue toward storage tank tops,” Morse said. “It’s impossible to call a bottom point, which could, as a result of oversupply and the economics of storage, fall well below $40 a barrel for WTI, perhaps as low as the $20 range for a while.”

Rig Count

WTI for March delivery rose 0.3% to US $51.83 a barrel by 9:14 a.m. London time in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The U.S. benchmark gained 7.2% last week, the biggest weekly advance in four years, as U.S. producers pulled rigs off oil fields for a ninth week.

Drillers idled 83 rigs last week, cutting the total number in operation to 1,140, the lowest since December 2011, according to data from Baker Hughes Inc. Friday.

Oil should bottom between the end of the first quarter and beginning of the second quarter in the $40 range, Morse said. At that point, the market should start to balance, first with an end to inventory builds and later on with declining stockpiles.

U.S. crude inventories expanded by 6.33 million barrels to 413.1 million in the week ended Jan. 30, the highest in weekly records compiled since 1982, Energy Information Administration data show. Crude output rose 27,000 barrels a day to 9.21 million a week earlier, the most in weekly estimates that started in 1983.

Oil supply will probably exceed demand by 700,000 barrels a day in the first quarter and 800,000 barrels a day in the second quarter, Morse said in the report. Stockpiles at Cushing, Oklahoma, the delivery point for WTI, have climbed 29% this year to 41.4 million barrels by Jan. 30, according to EIA data. They are “heading toward tank-tops,” according to Morse.

quote:

Sales of existing homes will slide 16% in Alberta this year as a plunge in oil drags down the provincial economy, according to Royal Bank of Canada.

The number of homes changing hands will drop to 60,500 from 71,800 in 2014, according to a forecast Monday from the Toronto-based lender. The bank predicted in a Jan. 15 note Alberta home sales would fall 6.5%. The decline would be the biggest since a 21% drop in 2008.

“We’re in for some kind of a correction in the province,” Robert Hogue, senior economist at Royal Bank said by telephone from Toronto. “Whether this will translate on the pricing side remains to be seen. We’ve seen in the numbers in the past few months a change in psychology in the province.”

Royal Bank predicts prices will fall 0.5% to an average $370,600, the most since a 6.5% drop in 2009.

Crude oil’s 50% drop since June is already affecting the Alberta housing market. Calgary, its largest city, reported a 25% drop in home sales in December from November, the biggest monthly drop since October 2008.

Saskatchewan is forecast to have the biggest drop in resale house prices this year, with a 3.2% decline to $344,200 projected by Royal Bank, the second-biggest lender by assets in Canada.

Gains of 4.7% in Ontario, and 10.5% in British Columbia, fuelled mostly by lower interest rates, are set to pull housing resales up 1.7% nationwide to 489,500, according to Royal Bank’s forecasts. Royal Bank forecasts all provinces will face declining resales in 2016 while home prices will only gain in Manitoba.

Furnaceface posted:

Didnt it only take 2-3 years for the biggest bubble cities in the USA to get hit? And thats with a way more robust economy than Canada.

I still really enjoy my dad comparing Canada's bubble to a game of Jenga, since you really dont see the holes and weak spots in the structure until youre well into the game and everyone seems pretty content that they can just keep building it up Up UP until its too late.

cowofwar posted:

In a generation all those weird mainland chinese superstitions wont be so prevalent so get on the property ladder now and build haunted hospice condo/laneway death house equity.

Throatwarbler posted:

All property in China is leasehold. What I'm talking about isn't even a leasehold, it's a construction that is technically illegal, with no authority or approval from the level of government above the one you are dealing with. You don't actually get anything for your money other than a lower level goverment official shaking your hand and promising that if your money is good you can live in this house (that we illegally built without authorization).

Cultural Imperial posted:

No lie, I asked for a license plate with as many 4s as possible to piss my mom off.

You can take em out of the hutong but you can't the hutong out

jet sanchEz posted:

My friend lived at number 48 and his mom blamed any and all problems on this unlucky number and, when she finally cut off her toes while mowing the grass (yes, she was wearing flip flops), they moved. They only bought the place because it was cheap and her husband didn't believe in superstitious bullshit.

etalian posted:

Put a 4 in all of Vancouver's street numbers.

Weird BIAS posted:

Ok this really is awesome.

Jan posted:

My vietnamese friend was reluctant to move closer to her invasive mother, but ended up getting a condo with the number 404 to keep her away.

Cultural Imperial posted:

You laugh but burnaby was letting people apply to renumber their houses. All the mainlanders on my block applied for 8s asap.

PT6A posted:

As a web developer, I find that a deeply inauspicious number and would avoid it. The only worse thing would be... 500...

EDIT: I'm joking above, obviously, but some people seem to take this very seriously. Leading me to my next question: are Chinese people predisposed to be retarded or something? Between this and their fixation on using rare animal parts to cure diseases, it seems like there's something very broken in that culture.

PT6A posted:

EDIT: I'm joking above, obviously, but some people seem to take this very seriously. Leading me to my next question: are Chinese people predisposed to be retarded or something? Between this and their fixation on using rare animal parts to cure diseases, it seems like there's something very broken in that culture.