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I don't understand why someone who doesn't have an ownership interest in a strata should be able to serve on its board. That just seems stupid.
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May 16, 2017 20:35
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Lobok posted:When they run the boards do they then funnel repair and maintenance work to their friends or their own companies? That's almost certainly the goal. mashed_penguin posted:I don't understand why someone who doesn't have an ownership interest in a strata should be able to serve on its board. That just seems stupid. And yeah, it's weird that this is allowed at all, especially since I think condominium corporations are operating under their own legislation anyway.
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May 16, 2017 20:36
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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http://www.bnn.ca/hong-kong-ad-offers-to-cover-foreign-buyers-tax-for-toronto-condo-investors-1.753423quote:A real estate ad has surfaced in Hong Kong promising to cover Ontario’s recently-implemented foreign buyers’ tax and a rent guarantee of up to one year for the first 30 buyers of units in a downtown Toronto condo building. Awesome advertising for Toronto condos.
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May 16, 2017 21:23
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Did someone say China? https://twitter.com/YuanTalks/status/864296198911385600
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May 17, 2017 00:27
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Like the whole world is on an insatiable credit binge causing massive amounts of capital to slosh around trying to find somewhere to go and causing bubbles left and right. http://www.profstevekeen.com/data-on-credit-employment-and-house-prices/
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May 17, 2017 00:29
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Target high inflation, peg the minimum wage to it.
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May 17, 2017 00:43
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Anything that isn't part of the inflation index is in a hyper-inflation bubble so people are getting poorer at an incredible rate while the governments shrug and point at the inflation rate of 1% while cutting overnight rates. Cutting rates worked back when inflation was hanging out around 5% and occasionally dropped; but it doesn't work anymore in our decade of low growth. The cheap money for so long is going to create bubbles of never before seen size. cowofwar fucked around with this message at 00:53 on May 17, 2017 |
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May 17, 2017 00:50
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I can't say I'll be sad to see the death of capitalism via its own avarice. 
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May 17, 2017 01:42
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Rime posted:I can't say I'll be sad to see the death of capitalism via its own avarice. Capital does what it does because it works. When it stops working, it'll just do something else.
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May 17, 2017 02:04
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Condo Stratas are really bad ideas. I mean they're fine if you have some 30 unit building where all are owner-occupied and people know each other and care about the building. In that ideal situation they can work fine, but there's still no gaurantee there won't be drama and mismanagement. Where things get really fucky is when the lawyerins get involved and you have 10 units in a huge tower owned by an company that's just some guy and his family but for tax reasons he has each condo as its own company and some of the companies are in his name but he also went 50/50 on a couple with his son and his mother in law and he rents one of them out to his cousin for cheap but he's also "renting" 4 of them out to his brother who put them on airbnb while the others are rented legally as furnished units for short stay international "students". You end up with this tower with 200 units, 120 are owned by "investors", a bunch of others are owned by individuals directly who don't live there, and some are actually owner occupied. The owners just want peace and quiet and to PROTECT THEIR EQUITY in the long term. The investors just want to hold and flip as soon as the time is right (they'll know when the crash is going to hit and sell weeks before, they got it all planned out) and the people doing illegal airbnb's and amateur landlording only care about their monthly margins so want low strata fees and no special assessments no matter what. And the poor fuckers actually renting and living in the units are treated as 4th class citizens within the building and constantly dicked around by their illegal or painfully amateur landlords and they'll take it out on the building. This is why a lot of buildings forbid rentals. This wasn't some class war, but condos and the strata system can get really lovely once investor-landlords and pissed off tenants get involved. This is why I think the strata system is hosed and bad. No group of 20 or even 100 people really have the time or expertise to properly run a building with full legal, financial, and engineering knowledge to make optimal choices. Create a city-owned management company to handle most of the heavy lifting and prevent stratas from loving them selves over. Let them vote on what plants to get for the lobby, but not on weather to fix the leaking parkade or not. And instead of each condo having a thousand tiny budgets, there'd be one deep city-wide chest. Everyone would pay essentially a condo tax which would go towards upkeep of the building, managed with actual long-term vision and economies of scale/discounts that can only come from a single entity managing thousands of buildings. Oh also have the city own and operate all rental buildings too, make them one and the same with everyone having the option to either rent or pay for a long term lease but all coming with similar rights and protections.
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May 17, 2017 02:36
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Baronjutter posted:Condo Stratas are really bad ideas. I mean they're fine if you have some 30 unit building where all are owner-occupied and people know each other and care about the building. In that ideal situation they can work fine, but there's still no gaurantee there won't be drama and mismanagement. Where things get really fucky is when the lawyerins get involved and you have 10 units in a huge tower owned by an company that's just some guy and his family but for tax reasons he has each condo as its own company and some of the companies are in his name but he also went 50/50 on a couple with his son and his mother in law and he rents one of them out to his cousin for cheap but he's also "renting" 4 of them out to his brother who put them on airbnb while the others are rented legally as furnished units for short stay international "students". gently caress off, you're giving me nightmares about what my future holds. I don't feel at all well. (Yes, I know it's my own drat fault)
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May 17, 2017 02:43
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So I got bored and experimented this week. Went car shopping for a vehicle I had no business buying and rolled into the dealership to check out their financing rates. I put down my monthly income as $6k on the application, with a 10% downpayment, and then handed them a paystub which clearly shows I've averaged barely $2700/month since January (this winter is killing me). The fuckers came back with a quote first thing the next morning at 5.5% interest over five years, despite how this would leverage me 10:1, maybe a bit more.  This wasn't even a shady off-market loan, either, it was with a major name dealership and financed through TD. Jesus wept, this country is hosed.
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May 17, 2017 02:45
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Baronjutter posted:Condo Stratas are really bad ideas. I mean they're fine if you have some 30 unit building where all are owner-occupied and people know each other and care about the building. In that ideal situation they can work fine, but there's still no gaurantee there won't be drama and mismanagement. Where things get really fucky is when the lawyerins get involved and you have 10 units in a huge tower owned by an company that's just some guy and his family but for tax reasons he has each condo as its own company and some of the companies are in his name but he also went 50/50 on a couple with his son and his mother in law and he rents one of them out to his cousin for cheap but he's also "renting" 4 of them out to his brother who put them on airbnb while the others are rented legally as furnished units for short stay international "students". Single payer condo insurance I guess.
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May 17, 2017 03:43
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Rime posted:So I got bored and experimented this week. Went car shopping for a vehicle I had no business buying and rolled into the dealership to check out their financing rates. Sell it to you, repo it, resell it, and collect the rest by garnishing your wages. I'm sure this kind of shady poo poo happens all the time. Hell it was the opening missions in gta5.
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May 17, 2017 03:55
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Newfie posted:Sell it to you, repo it, resell it, and collect the rest by garnishing your wages. I'm sure this kind of shady poo poo happens all the time. Hell it was the opening missions in gta5. My husband's ex-business partner's ex-fiance's family (lol) used to run one of those shady car places in Australia. Basically, they go to an auction and buy the car for $500. They put it on sale for 5k and advertise 10% down and it's yours!! No credit!! Bad credit!! Are you a horse? That's ok too!! The person pays the $500, they recoup what they've paid. Now any payments that the person actually makes on the car is just a bonus. So they make 5-6 payments (generally) then start getting late. Eventually they get late enough that the company comes and takes the car back, they put it back up for sale for $5k, rinse and repeat. It's insane how much money they were making.
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May 17, 2017 04:46
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Baronjutter posted:Condo Stratas are really bad ideas. I mean they're fine if you have some 30 unit building where all are owner-occupied and people know each other and care about the building. In that ideal situation they can work fine, but there's still no gaurantee there won't be drama and mismanagement. Where things get really fucky is when the lawyerins get involved and you have 10 units in a huge tower owned by an company that's just some guy and his family but for tax reasons he has each condo as its own company and some of the companies are in his name but he also went 50/50 on a couple with his son and his mother in law and he rents one of them out to his cousin for cheap but he's also "renting" 4 of them out to his brother who put them on airbnb while the others are rented legally as furnished units for short stay international "students". What do you think of co-ops? I'm told they tend to restrict rentals and thus are owner occupied and they are picky about who they let buy in. As a bonus, they're a lot cheaper as a result of these restrictions.
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May 17, 2017 04:48
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Cold on a Cob posted:What do you think of co-ops? I'm told they tend to restrict rentals and thus are owner occupied and they are picky about who they let buy in. As a bonus, they're a lot cheaper as a result of these restrictions. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/this-is-nuts-why-hundreds-lined-up-to-see-a-2-bedroom-1-200-co-op-suite-1.4078756 Also hard to get into.
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May 17, 2017 06:03
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Cold on a Cob posted:What do you think of co-ops? I'm told they tend to restrict rentals and thus are owner occupied and they are picky about who they let buy in. As a bonus, they're a lot cheaper as a result of these restrictions. As effectively no co-ops have been built since CMHC ended their funding of new ones in the mid-1980s and most of the occupants are lower-income, the maintenance situation in virtually all housing co-ops is quite dire. A couple years ago I was thinking it was kind of surprising that we don't ever hear of them being gradually taken over by upper middle class sorts who can then afford to do some real improvements, but perhaps that's because real estate has only so recently reached the "even (much of) the upper middle class are priced out of 3+ bedroom places" point. When I was digging into it across a pretty broad range of people I knew, though, I did get some stories of co-ops that were effectively taken over by people from particular churches...
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May 17, 2017 06:59
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https://twitter.com/MortgageMark/status/864854764428722176
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May 18, 2017 00:22
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While I don't disagree, as someone noted there, that's from a 2009 G&M article
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May 18, 2017 00:32
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Wasting posted:While I don't disagree, as someone noted there, that's from a 2009 G&M article Oh lol
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May 18, 2017 00:34
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At my work 3 people left 4-5 weeks vacation and 90k+ to become realtors. All are making even even more money than before. One caters exclusively to mandarin speakers selling condos. For some reason I was cruising LinkedIn and saw someone I knew in common with this name I recognized. I dug further and realized it was my wedding photographer. On LinkedIn? Strange. I looked more carefully, wedding photog and mortgage broker.
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May 18, 2017 01:00
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My biggest regret in life is not learning Mandarin, so that I too could sell out my country and retire while I am young and the world not yet declined into anarchy. 
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May 18, 2017 01:32
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Risky Bisquick posted:At my work 3 people left 4-5 weeks vacation and 90k+ to become realtors. All are making even even more money than before. One caters exclusively to mandarin speakers selling condos. most of the engineers / tech consultants I know with their real estate licenses just do both
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May 18, 2017 01:44
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What is it with people thinking "just learn mandarin" is their ticket to the international elite
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May 18, 2017 01:48
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THC posted:What is it with people thinking "just learn mandarin" is their ticket to the international elite Same reason people tried to learn japanese.
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May 18, 2017 01:54
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The people in my circle are Chinese, not CBC or Chinese as a second language posers. This is my adhoc real estate story for the month. Jordan7hm posted:most of the engineers / tech consultants I know with their real estate licenses just do both Their side businesses eventually just got too busy so they opened up their own real estate company. One of them is making 250k now at a guess, and has opened some fast food related franchises albeit handsoff to hedge against real estate cratering.
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May 18, 2017 02:35
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Barudak posted:Same reason people tried to learn japanese. I don't think they dub my favourite japanese animes in Mandarin.
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May 18, 2017 02:52
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MikeSevigny posted:I don't think they dub my favourite japanese animes in Mandarin. Is your favorite anime Slam Dunk because theyve got you loving covered.
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May 18, 2017 03:32
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Good op-ed by some VERY intelligent economists: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-commentary/bad-policy-has-played-a-role-in-canadas-housing-crisis/article35019958/
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May 18, 2017 16:01
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http://inroadsjournal.ca/housing-price-lunacy-moves-east/
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May 18, 2017 22:58
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Jordan7hm posted:most of the engineers / tech consultants I know with their real estate licenses just do both You remember the huge state of emergency Montreal had back in either Feb or March, where an entire stretch of highway was left stranded in the snow overnight? Apparently, the higher up at Surete de Quebec is also a realtor and was dealing with that poo poo instead of, y'know, keeping an eye on the massive poo poo storm being caused on the 13. Edit: here we go - http://montreal.ctvnews.ca/mobile/sq-officer-was-working-on-second-job-night-of-hwy-13-debacle-report-1.3344944 Rupert Buttermilk fucked around with this message at 23:13 on May 18, 2017 |
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May 18, 2017 23:09
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Well, little doubt now that it’s happening. The correction. First we take Big Smoke. Then we take Vandelusia. “I’m a Real Estate Lawyer in the GTA and have been an avid reader of your blog for some years now,” says Baqa, who thinks his job description deserves Capitalizing. “We’ve heard all the headlines and posts like “SOLD 1000% OVER ASKING WITHIN 42 MINUTES” etc but we don’t hear the flip side. Today I had FOUR calls within a couple of hours with people trying to get out of their new deals. Each and every one of them said the same thing, they overbid and are now having buyer’s remorse. “If these dominoes start falling we may have a crisis as early as this summer.” Interesting that this lawyer works the mean streets of Mississauga, where the average house now costs $796,555, and a detached goes for $1.2 million. Yes, in Mississauga. Land of a million minivans, 12-lane expressways, giant malls, the Marilyn Munro skyscraper condos and a spidery web of soulless, tree-deprived cul-de-sacs. After a torrid early rutting season, sales last month slipped 7% year/year, but prices managed to bloat by more than 27%. But, as in the Kingdom of 416 down the road, listings are piling up. 25% more in April – and that was just the beginning. In the last seven days another 10,500 properties came on the market in the Golden Horseshoe surrounding Toronto. All of a sudden the 48,000 real estate agents who had nothing to sell three months ago are overwhelmed. And, miraculously, the buyers seem to have stopped buying. Bidding wars are now rare. Sellers have once again started to accept offers conditional upon a home inspection. Even on financing. Agents have been holding offer nights but receiving none. Listings that would have been swarmed the day they appeared now languish for weeks. And, most of all, the choice is exploding with more than 1,000 or more fresh MLS offerings in the region every 24 hours. This is human nature on parade. When assets rise and that’s all people talk about, everybody wants in. FOMO, or fear of missing out, was the primary market driver in February and March, when 416 prices rocketed ahead more than 30% year/year. Buyers fell over each other in a frenzy to “get in” at any cost – based on the belief that today’s price, even wildly inflated, would look cheap next year. So, the more houses cost, the greater the demand. As for owners, few listed because they believed the ascent would be endless. Why part with something that’s going up by a third every year? But many also felt trapped inside their wealth – since they couldn’t afford to buy their own house at market prices, let alone sell and move up. In the past few weeks, that’s all turned. Now it’s a mad rush to capitalize on the greatest greater-fool real estate market in Canadian history, cashing in those windfall profits before they vaporize. Plus, the sudden prospect of a declining market has scared the crap out of an army of amateur landlords, flippers and speckers who leveraged themselves up the wazoo. New, universal rent controls make monthly losses on condos a virtual certainty while a flood of listings and Ontario’s anti-bubble program mean the potential for capital gains has gone pffft. What’s next? Busy lawyers, like Baqa. A slew of deals will be falling apart over the next few weeks, with thousands of people shocked at what the process is actually like. There’s no easy exit from a locked-in contract like an offer of purchase & sale, and the damages jilted sellers can claim will augment with each market decline. Expect even more listings and fewer sales. The ratio will take a brutal turn, leading then to price reductions in the summer. The pace and depth are unknown. It could be as mild as 15%, as serious as the 33% drop when the last boom turned to bust or – if rates rise, Trump tears up NAFTA or more mortgage companies fail – worse. What the events of the last few weeks have suggested is that historic bubbles can have epic endings. And that is just what economists, ratings agencies, bankers, politicians – and a certain pathetic blog – have been warning. Anything that goes up 30% in a year with no economic justification can come down just as hard. Finally, this is not a Toronto story. The GTA has six million people. The wider region adds another 3.4 million. That’s almost a third of the national population. The bubble’s bursting because average families can no longer afford average houses, just like in Van. We flew too near the sun. Don’t count on a soft landing. No feathers left. http://www.greaterfool.ca/2017/05/18/the-turn/
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May 19, 2017 08:00
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If that's what Garth Turner is saying, it's a pretty strong indication that the market is about to take off to even more dizzying levels
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May 19, 2017 08:50
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Here's an anecdote, and I don't know if there's a moral. My twin brother just graduated from a Canadian med school. As a med student with no income, he was able to open an unsecured $275,000 line of credit when he started school. I think after four years of school, he's sitting at about...80 grand on it or something? Anyways, now that he has his residency booked and knows that he's stuck in the same city for the next five years, he decides he wants to try to buy a condo. We don't live in Vancouver or Toronto, so this involves a lot of money but not 'gently caress you' money. He meets with some advisers, does some budgeting, and comes to the conclusion that using his student mega line of credit to put a down payment on a mortgage is actually totally feasible. This sounds sketchy to me, but he's a smart guy/literally a doctor so I figure he's probably thought this through more than I have. Problem: Banks don't let you pay off your mortgage from a line of credit because it's sketchy debt juggling. Or at least they don't if you have the mortgage and LOC at the same bank and they can notice you doing it. So he talks with the parents and they work out a deal where they'll transfer him money for the down payment from their LOC, and he just transfers it back to them immediately from his LOC. Another problem: The parents' line of credit is only 100K, and with what's currently on it there's not enough money to transfer to my brother for the down payment. My parents have had the credit for a decade or two though and and have since gotten way more income, so they figure it would be about one phone call to bump it up to 200k and then transfer the money. Wrong. Bank won't increase their limit unless they secure the LOC against the house, which requires sending an inspector out to check it out. For reference, my parent's joint yearly income is over 300K, and the house is worth over a million with no mortgage on it, and the bank knew all this stuff already because they've been using them for two decades. Apparently that doesn't get you an unsecured 275K no questions asked like being in med school does! Anyways, it took longer than they thought, but they did get the credit limit up, did the deal, and my brother now owns a condo before receiving his first paycheck of residency. I'm beating him in net worth right now because he's sitting at -300k or so and I've got a few thousand bucks in the bank. But he's an owner and I live in the parents' basement so he's got that going for him. I also still haven't found work in my field yet a year after finishing my master's degree so maybe banks are onto something with the 'give med students infinite money and tell everyone else to gently caress off' thing. Anyways, the whole thing feels profoundly weird to me but all I've really learned is that banks are hosed, debt is hosed, Canada is hosed, having rich parents makes everything easier, and I hate everything.
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May 19, 2017 09:52
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I have a sneaking suspicion that tearing down the road towards us just around the bend is the bus everyone's about to be thrown under in order to protect home equity.
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May 19, 2017 13:24
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Also while a lot and of my liquid assets got tied up in our house over the past several months we still have a decent chunk of change and when my wife gets home I think now is the time to open a USD account and put it all in there.
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May 19, 2017 13:26
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attackmole posted:Anyways, the whole thing feels profoundly weird to me but all I've really learned is that banks are hosed, debt is hosed, Canada is hosed, having rich parents makes everything easier, and I hate everything. This actually all sounds pretty normal to me - banks issue pro-fac students unsecured lines of credit all the time because students have nothing to secure against, and they generally come out the other side earners. It's a risk they understand and are comfortable with - It doesn't matter how much money you make as an adult with a career, you aren't ever going to get an unsecured line of credit for $250,000 from a major bank, especially if you own assets they can secure. Your parents could probably get a line for 75% of their home's value at a low rate if they secured against it. - The bank doesn't want you using a student line of credit to gamble on real-estate. Seems sane to me, not hosed. - Your parents got involved, just like they do in a lot of cases where kids are buying condos/homes these days. Good luck with all that.
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May 19, 2017 13:39
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If a market is going to eat poo poo it would be nice if it could be Vancouver.
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May 19, 2017 14:43
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cowofwar posted:If a market is going to eat poo poo it would be nice if it could be Vancouver. Toronto would be better because it drags so much down with it. Make the Greater Golden Horseshoe not great again I say. attackmole posted:Anyways, the whole thing feels profoundly weird to me but all I've really learned is that banks are hosed, debt is hosed, Canada is hosed, having rich parents makes everything easier, and I hate everything. The weird part about it is buying a place at the start of a residency. You're not even going to be there or have time to look after it, might need to change cities after to find a job, do locums or subspecialty or who knows. Postess with the Mostest fucked around with this message at 14:49 on May 19, 2017 |
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May 19, 2017 14:46
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