quote:

Mr. Yan, the author of the empty condo report for BTA Works, was intrigued by the potential impact of the few-months-at-a-time renter. That sort of condo use would not have made it into his empty condo study, which was based on electricity usage. He said the short-term renter would have just as big an impact as the empty condo, however, because they are competing with rental stock for the working local looking for a home.

Femtosecond posted:

The massive difference between empty condos and short term rentals (STR) though is that in the empty condos are completely useless, whereas STR are occupied by tourists that are injecting significant amounts of money into the local economy.

PT6A posted:

Why is long-term rental availability inherently better than short-term rental availability? The use cases are completely different, and you need both. It's ridiculous to blame AirBnB for low rental availability just the same as it would be stupid to blame a company like Premiere Executive Suites.

Franks Happy Place posted:

The part you seem to be missing is that having outside money flowing into the housing market is indeed stimulate, but that stimulation has serious negative repercussions for the local housing market, and the vagur and ill defined economic benefits don't remotely offset those repercussions.

Housing is not a commodity, it's a necessity for living. If the local housing market has entirely decoupled from local incomes, that's bad, and some dickhead making a few grand a year renting his shoebox condo doesn't change that fact.

Cultural Imperial posted:

Want to make Airbnb less lucrative and thus increase long term rental stock? Increase supply of hotels.

Oh wait there's a cartel of special interest groups who aren't interested in this sort liberalization.

I guess this should put you sjws on the side of hotel chains.

Bloody Hedgehog posted:

If you've got that much money to build a literal mansion, why aren't you buying some more secluded property instead of building in the (rich person) suburbs?

EngineerJoe posted:

"Don't buy the most expensive house in the neighbourhood" Oops

http://www.centris.ca/en/houses~for-sale~candiac~monteregie~5-rue-dublin/27766649

Vehementi posted:

Is that a garage with 5 garage doors?

PT6A posted:

To be fair, if I had the sort of money where having a $7 mil house seemed reasonable, I'd have at least 5 cars.

apatheticman posted:

To be fair, those are double car garages.

EngineerJoe posted:

I'm not sure. It lacks the seclusion of a rural mansion but it's also lacks the urban appeal of a place like Westmount. It's probably a lot easier to sell a $7 million house in Wesmount even if it ends up being a lot smaller.

Cultural Imperial posted:

Hey motherfuckers its neoliberal macro guessing time. China's stock market declined 7+percent last week and pboc responded by dropping the o/n rate for the 4th time since last November and dropped bank reserve ratios by 1%.

Greece couldn't find a solution to their debt problem so their ~Marxist pm decided to pull a christy Clark and put the question of crippling austerity vs eurozone membership to a referendum.

This coming week is either going to be loving hilarious for the world of finance or I will stop drinking alcohol for a month.

Is this the start of something really bad for Canadian housing finance or not?

quote:

Vancouverites rediscovering the ‘magic’ of being out on the water

Gorau posted:

Edit: also all stimulus is universal! The amount of money that the central bank in China pumps into the economy is going slosh around in capital markets around the world, not just in China.

Cultural Imperial posted:

Cultural Imperial posted:

http://www.vancouversun.com/touch/story.html?id=11171131


lol

Mandibular Fiasco posted:

Yeah, because a paediatric anesthesiologist and a psychologist are representative of the community at large.

etalian posted:

lol

Fronczek believes it is a combination of relief that the recession is over and people suddenly deciding life is too short.

Mandibular Fiasco posted:

Brilliant. YOLO and the absence of personal angst are now economic variables to be modelled.

So 'life is too short'...how does one know that if one doesn't know exactly how long one is going to live? "Too short" for what, exactly? And when did this recession actually end? I'm employed, which is more than I can say for when I lost my job in the middle of the GFC, but it's hardly fantastic goings.

I can't understand why journalists quote people making these statements without asking them what evidence they have for their position beyond personal experience. I am continually reminded of Lionel Hutz who said that he had "plenty of hearsay and conjecture" which were "kinds of evidence".

Edit: And seriously, we're trusting the boat sales guy to tell us about the state of the economy? This is only marginally better a tactic then let's ask the bozo on the street what he thinks about <INSERT TOPIC HERE>.

etalian posted:

also the classic thing in which they ask real estate agents and brokers what the market will do.

Mandibular Fiasco posted:

Yes, the joys of being a middle-man. Everything is great until someone figures out how to get rid of you.

quote:

Time is running out for struggling department store chain Sears Canada to improve its financial results and the chances of survival are slim, says one retail analyst.

Keith Howlett of Desjardins published a report Friday saying it’s “now or never” for the money-losing company to make headway on a turnaround that has dragged on for several years with little progress.

“The next seven quarters are ’make it or break it’ for Sears Canada,” he wrote.

“Our current view is that an operating turnaround is improbable.”

Howlett’s prediction suggests the fate of the company will be determined some time around the 2016 holiday shopping season.

quote:

A Canadian mortgage meltdown? Unlikely

The supposedly elevated level of Canadian household debt levels relative to Americans has ignited a lot of talk about whether it is an opportune time to short Canadian banks.

Media reports suggest some U.S. hedge funds are doing just that, amid expectations of a Canadian mortgage market meltdown similar to the one in the United States in 2008-09.

Does this really make any sense?

The often-cited household debt-to-income measure saw a modest decline in the first quarter of 2015 to 163.3 per cent from the record high of 163.6 per cent at the end of 2014, while the analytically preferable debt-to-asset and debt-to-net worth ratios saw more significant declines, with each hitting seven-year lows in the first quarter. The former was down to 17.5 per cent from 17.9 per cent in each of the previous three quarters while the latter improved to 21.3 per cent from 21.9 per cent. These measures give a better indication of household solvency, given that financial obligations could be met with the disposition of assets.

What we are seeing is that debt is being used to finance asset purchases – either investing in real estate (holdings rose by $55-billion or 1.2 per cent in the first quarter) or financial assets (up $246-billion or 4.4 per cent to mark the strongest one-quarter increase on record back to 1990). These in turn are boosting overall household wealth and thus, mitigating some of the concern about the overall indebtedness of Canadian households. The balance sheet data emphasize the fact that assets are worth more than 5 1/2-times that of debt.

Indeed, the debt-to-income ratio is elevated versus its historical levels, but there are many mitigating factors, such as the strength of the asset side of the balance sheet, the fact that Canadian homeowners have substantial skin in the game, and the fact that the cost of carrying this debt touched yet another record low in the first quarter.

The debt service ratio in Canada is at its historically lowest level of 6.74 in the first quarter, nearly double the ratio in the early 1990s. We would need either a massive rate shock or a massive unemployment problem to generate a bad default experience.

Canada’s unemployment rate at 6.8 per cent in May at first looks elevated relative to the unemployment rate of 5.5 per cent in the United States, but on an apples-to-apples basis, Canada’s unemployment rate is 6.0 per cent which is not far above the U.S. level. Moreover, the broad R8 employment measure (that includes those marginally attached to labour force because of economic reasons) in Canada is at 10.1 per cent compared to 10.8 per cent stateside.

Meanwhile, the average weekly wage rate in Canada is accelerating. As of May, the year-over-year trend accelerated to more than three per cent, the strongest growth since October 2012.

What about the banks and supply side of the mortgage market?

The share of insured residential mortgages on Canadian banks’ balance sheets currently stands at 54 per cent, more than double the share when the banks last got in trouble in the late 1980s to the early 1990s.

Canadian banks historically have a high exposure to credit card loans, but since 2011 this share out of the non-mortgage loans declined from nearly 11 per cent to roughly 8 per cent in the first quarter of 2015.

Another argument for having a bearish outlook on the performance of Canadian banks is their exposure to energy companies.

Non-mortgage loans to oil and gas industry surged 70 per cent in the last year to record high. However, the matter of fact is that the share of loans to oil and energy companies out of the non-mortgage loan book is only 1 per cent compared to 6 per cent in 1985-86.

Those hedge funds shorting Canadian banks that have a 4-per-cent yield better know what they are doing, because nothing nefarious is happening to the local real estate market until the Bank of Canada begins the process of raising rates and boosting carrying charges.