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Have to wonder how much of the "investors" are parents that had to go on title with their kids. Still think the investors are a problem.
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# ? Feb 11, 2023 22:59 |
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# ? Jun 8, 2024 04:56 |
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Clarifying my last post a bit, I'm not trying to be The Landlord Defender here in any way at all, but I have a bit of unease around how it seems like renters are being implicitly targeted in these articles, just not in directly in name (presumably because that would be too gauche). Previously our arguments about Bad Investors were around foreign investors that were buying up condos, thus inflating and competing with mild mannered Canadian buyers (the hero of our story) and you know what this was actually a bit troubling because there was some clear evidence out there that condo developers were explicitly chasing this market. For example how Westbank was explicitly opening up sales offices in Asian cities and describing their product as ideal pied-a-terres in their marketing materials. Of course if these condos were being used as pied-a-terres, they were mostly left empty and this is not a real good use of land that is helpful to the local populace. So there was clearly a real problem here in that housing was being built for the super rich to leave mostly empty and moreover than that valuable city staff time was being taken up by reviewing this sort of stuff and thus not available to be spent on reviewing homes for locals, thus adding to their cost. Now flash forward many years and there are layers upon layers of taxes designed to end this problem. Argue on about whether there's still some skirting of the rules, but we do know for sure that these taxes and regulations have had an effect. We know that Westbank has closed up their Asian offices, has pivoted to building more rental, and we know that CMHC has found that thousands of empty homes have gone onto the market to be rented. So at this point we at least know that while there's still investors owning properties they don't live in, there's also a lot of local renters living in those properties and benefiting from those properties existing for their use. With that in mind doubling down on Investors Are The Problem is now quite a bit more weird in its positioning that whereas before our conflict was between the Noble Canadian First Time Homebuyer Buyer versus the Evil Foreign Absentee Owner, now the villain of the Noble Canadian Buyer is... what? Some some 22 year old local renter? Yes these articles say that the villain is still the Evil Investor, but in practice now behind that investor there's a local Canadian that isn't at all in the position to buy a property, but who is probably quite pleased to have somewhere to live. There is an assumption in these articles that things would of course be better for the First Time Homebuyer if these investors went away somehow. Not explored at all is what happens to the renters currently living in those properties. It would be nice if the CBC/Globe/Star talked for even just a little bit about what would be good for that group of people, not just what would be good for the Noble Canadian First Time Homebuyer. Supposing we somehow banned investor ownership in condos, and presuming nothing really changes at all, I'm curious to know where Andy Yan n' co would shift their griping to next. Presumably they'd starting whining that purpose built rentals built by ~investors~ were inflating land values and making condos more expensive. Femtosecond fucked around with this message at 00:15 on Feb 12, 2023 |
# ? Feb 12, 2023 00:09 |
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Femtosecond posted:... I don't think the homeowners matter at all to the greater market. The GFC wasn't caused by perfidious homeowners bilking the banks. The underlying problem was that banks could make a lot of money trading in securities with mortgages as the underlying asset and that created a nearly unquenchable thirst for mortgages. The housing crisis was the trigger to the larger financial crisis, it is the financialization that matters to the greater market.
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# ? Feb 12, 2023 00:27 |
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Femtosecond posted:... I imagine from here the perspective is that people want PBR developments, whether that be directly from government or via the government making it viable for developers to make such buildings. But I think you're right that it seems unlikely this is what the broadly right-wing media is pushing for. "Investor-owned" does seem to take a rather short route to "renter-occupied". I think the space in here for "investors are the problem" is the take that some number of landlords (many? a few?) are not really in the rentals business hence people calling them investors and not landlords. For them, renting out their property is a necessary evil until they've sat on it long enough for number to go up. It's speculative investment not based on its viability as an income-producing asset, but only on property value bubbles. I'm not making any claim on how broad of an impact this theory could have on housing prices though.
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# ? Feb 12, 2023 15:41 |
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I'd have a lot less of a problem with investor landlords that own units in condo buildings if they were all rent controlled and the rental price didn't reset every time they (often illegally) evict their tenants. Even better if there was better enforcement of the regulations as well, maybe even a licensing scheme for landlords.
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# ? Feb 12, 2023 16:43 |
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I think there's definitely a difference between people landlording as a going concern, and landlording as a consequence of their primary goal of building wealth through a real estate investment portfolio, but you can't really get that through data alone because they will both look like "people who own and rent out property" if you look at ownership vs. occupancy.
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# ? Feb 12, 2023 16:56 |
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PT6A posted:I think there's definitely a difference between people landlording as a going concern, and landlording as a consequence of their primary goal of building wealth through a real estate investment portfolio That's why at the very least, the concept of landlordism as "passive income" needs to die. If you're going to make money off of another human being's inherent need to shelter, then the least you can do is realize that it's a service you're providing and you need to be involved or get someone else to be involved if something happens. Other industries have regulation to make sure they don't hurt anyone and property management should be no different. It's also why I dislike the "mom and pop landlord" concept. If you can't take it upon yourself to be held to regulations in the same way that, say, a restaurant has to be held to health regulations, then you shouldn't be investing in it.
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# ? Feb 12, 2023 17:35 |
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Fidelitious posted:I think the space in here for "investors are the problem" is the take that some number of landlords (many? a few?) are not really in the rentals business hence people calling them investors and not landlords. For them, renting out their property is a necessary evil until they've sat on it long enough for number to go up. We know these folks definitely exist because of what I've been told from a property manager of what is pretty much the standard in condos, that they start out being dominated by rentals (like 60%+) and then slowly churn over to become more owner occupied dominated over time as early investors cash out. So these early investors' thesis is basically that they can leverage pre-sales and hope for big appreciation in the early years while maintenance costs are low, then sell as the units approach the 10 year mark when warranties start to end and real maintenance costs appear. All the while they are able to write off depreciation, fees, taxes, and maintenance and are probably able to at least come out neutral. It's at least a place to park a downpayment and hope that appreciation swings wildly in your favour. Now the other thing is, there's absolutely nothing stopping an owner occupier from doing the exact same thing, and in fact they are in some ways more incentivized to do this by the tax code which makes capital gains on a primary residence tax free (though you can now no longer write off maintenance and fees, but recall maintenance is near zero on a new condo). In my experience years ago being in a relatively new condo I met several of these people. This was around 2010 or so, and my neighbour told me he basically just lives in a condo for a few years, exploits appreciation and moves on. He had already done this several times before, each time trading up to a bigger and better place. Whether any of this increases the price in condos I have no idea. Is it these investors inducing the appreciation of condos, or are they just riding the wave as appreciation occurs due to other, bigger and broader systemic factors (eg. more people want to live in the town, thus increasing the value of property) ---- Dwelling on the numbers around the increase in "investors" holding more condos, I wonder if this is increase in investors could be a trend that also relates to the severe appreciation of certain areas resulting in peculiar new owner behaviours driven out of fears of being "priced out." Thinking back to another person that lived in that old building, when they left and moved to the prairies they held onto that condo and started renting it out. Once upon a time someone like that probably would have sold the place as they moved away, but if looking at the gap between appreciation speed in Vancouver vs Saskatoon, he could have been scared that if he let go of the Vancouver place, upon selling the Saskatoon place, he'd no longer have enough money to buy in Vancouver. Effectively the only way to maintain a toehold in ever owning in Vancouver is to never sell, thus he ends up renting that property out and becoming an investor. Another idea that comes from a conversation I had at a party last night. We were discussing how cheap rents used to be back in the 2000s and I mentioned my friend was still holding onto his rent controlled place, and that while it had become enormously affordable as his income had increased faster than the rents, the "downside" was that he was feeling golden handcuffs in that while he felt he'd like to move and own his own place, it was in every way on paper a Bad with Money move given his low rent. The person I was talking to immediately suggested that my friend should buy another place and rent it out, holding it in reserve for such a time where he is possibly ever evicted out of his current great rental. Not a bad idea at all but remarkable in how unusual this is. Again the outcome of this idea would be the creation of an investor owner. Basically any trend that would result in an owner wanting to hold onto a property even after they move is necessarily going to result in more investor owners. Maybe that sort of thing is increasing. Femtosecond fucked around with this message at 20:35 on Feb 12, 2023 |
# ? Feb 12, 2023 20:32 |
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https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/lake-huron-erosion-1.6736385 Idiot couple finds out 350K lakefront house is falling into the water. Still closes on deal. Now they're filing a 2.2M dollar lawsuit. Not sure why they think their damages are over 6 times as high as what they paid for the house.
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# ? Feb 13, 2023 03:13 |
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Lol
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# ? Feb 13, 2023 03:36 |
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quote:The statement of claim alleges that once they discovered the house was unsafe, they felt they couldn't back out of the deal — for risk of forfeiting their $5,000 deposit and face a possible lawsuit over the scuttled transaction.
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# ? Feb 13, 2023 06:56 |
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Mr. Apollo posted:I’m not a lawyer, but it seems like the seller telling you 3 days before the deal closes “by the way, the house is not safe to live in” would be reasonable grounds to call off the deal or at least postpone it pending an inspection. Not a lawyer either, but I think if you are buying as is and you forgo the inspection to close the deal, you are poo poo out of luck.
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# ? Feb 13, 2023 11:08 |
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Mr. Apollo posted:I’m not a lawyer, but it seems like the seller telling you 3 days before the deal closes “by the way, the house is not safe to live in” would be reasonable grounds to call off the deal or at least postpone it pending an inspection. If I may, I found the listing and these people are liars. First, the price for comparable listings of waterfront Lake Huron properties nearby is north of 800k. The actual sale price that I found is 250k, not the stated 330k. Either way, that's a big fuckin' clue right there. Further, a direct quote from the listing. "Extensive erosion control is now in place at the base of the lake bluff but further work is needed at the top, including consultation with a qualified engineer and permit from the conservation authority." And finally, behold one of several photos from the listing showing the encroaching erosion that obviously requires immediate remediation for safety purposes. You'd have to be a weapons-grade moron to not get something like this thoroughly investigated by geo engineers. The only difference is that they must remediate it immediately instead of being able to occupy it...while still having to do the exact same remediation. This is them using the media to help prop up their lovely lawsuit. Fidelitious fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Feb 13, 2023 |
# ? Feb 13, 2023 15:22 |
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Fidelitious posted:If I may, I found the listing and these people are liars.
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# ? Feb 13, 2023 16:12 |
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Are they the ones who went public? Probably bought the place thinking if luck didn't work then a go fund me or a lawsuit.
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# ? Feb 13, 2023 16:46 |
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Purgatory Glory posted:Are they the ones who went public? Probably bought the place thinking if luck didn't work then a go fund me or a lawsuit.
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# ? Feb 13, 2023 17:09 |
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Some pages ago, Femtosecond was talking about the new duplex zoning/permitting laws allowed in Vancouver, saying that there hadn't been much uptake. At least in my neighbourhood, that seems to be basically all the new construction happening right now, and a few of those units are coming on the market. We actually went to one open house just to see. Here are some examples: https://www.rew.ca/properties/4846884/3192-e-19th-avenue-vancouver-bc https://www.rew.ca/properties/4846899/3194-e-19th-street-vancouver-bc https://www.rew.ca/properties/4735876/3362-e-28th-avenue-vancouver-bc The one we looked at, I've actually been following. The developers paid $1.4m for the property, presumably a bit of money for permitting/asbestos/demolition, and listed about $650K in construction costs on the developer permit. So the whole thing likely cost around $2.2-$2.5m. They're asking $1.5m for each side of the duplex, but the places aren't exactly selling. And the whole thing is kind-of a weird mix of luxury, faux-luxury, and downright lovely. Like the kitchen/living room has 9' ceilings, a huge five-burner stove, a huge double-door fridge, an always-on surveillance camera system (lol) and a fancy electric fireplace. But most of the cabinets need a stepladder to reach, and there isn't actually enough room for a dining room table that isn't a tiny round four-seater. Also the cabinets are all lovely particle board underneath the veneer. The place has three bathrooms (all pretty big), but two out of three bedrooms have no storage, and are barely big enough to fit a single dresser alongside a double bed. There's a sort-of balcony, but it's maybe wide enough for a single chair, and opening the door takes up half the space of the balcony, so you can't actually put anything there. The "laundry" is just having the washer and dryer on a landing in the staircase, where you basically have to step backwards down the top step to get the door open. (Hope your balance is good!) The stairs are (probably) solid wood, but it's done such that there are obvious gaps next to each stair. There's silicon caulk connecting the baseboard to the floor, but whoever did it couldn't even get an even bead while doing caulk. The painting was obviously done with no thought of using tape, and there are paint drips in various places, as well as stucco drips on the roof. Oh yeah and the agent was all "it's a freehold, no strata!" but didn't really have an answer to my question of "what happens when the roof needs work?" Anyway, I figure that if anyone actually had $1.5m to spend on a three-bedroom, they'd either be looking for something that's actually a townhouse (with amenities, commons spaces, etc) or else an older house with more yard and a sane layout (like a Vancouver special or something). So, while it's good that development is happening, and I'm sure that where we had four bedrooms before, we have six bedrooms now, my intuition is that a lot of developers are going to take a bath on these, and that it's not a useful way to go about increasing the housing supply.
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# ? Feb 13, 2023 23:23 |
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Some pages ago, Femtosecond was talking about the new duplex zoning/permitting laws allowed in Vancouver, saying that there hadn't been much uptake. At least in my neighbourhood, that seems to be basically all the new construction happening right now, and a few of those units are coming on the market. We actually went to one open house just to see. Here are some examples: Hello neighbour. I saw that one on East 28th going up. I am kind of laughing.
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# ? Feb 13, 2023 23:56 |
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1.5million for half a house. Amazing. Think I'll keep renting actually.
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# ? Feb 14, 2023 00:00 |
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Land value continues to be a significant issue. You're mostly paying for where the land is, not the poo poo that's built on top of it, and nothing is being done to address that issue by making more land more valuable.
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# ? Feb 14, 2023 00:18 |
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qhat posted:Think I'll keep renting actually. Hitting the 20 years of renting mark this year, don't see it changing anytime soon.
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# ? Feb 14, 2023 01:02 |
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Some pages ago, Femtosecond was talking about the new duplex zoning/permitting laws allowed in Vancouver, saying that there hadn't been much uptake. At least in my neighbourhood, that seems to be basically all the new construction happening right now, and a few of those units are coming on the market. We actually went to one open house just to see. Here are some examples: I don't really follow what is going on here. Is this one building with two units with one in the front and one in the back? Are there garages on both sides? What is the benefit of this? Making sure that neighbors only see buildings that look like single family homes?
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# ? Feb 14, 2023 02:03 |
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MickeyFinn posted:I don't really follow what is going on here. Is this one building with two units with one in the front and one in the back? Are there garages on both sides? What is the benefit of this? Making sure that neighbors only see buildings that look like single family homes? 1) Yes. 2) Kinda -- one garage with two separate doors/rooms, one per unit. The yard is split up weirdly to allow for paths to both front doors and from both units to the garage. 3) Lol, probably something like that. TBH you could make more dwellings and make the whole thing easier to sell if you just built one big house with a main suite, 1-2 basement suites and a laneway. But you might struggle to get someone to pay $3m for that? I think the point is to try and trick someone into thinking this is a SFH, and not a glorified overpriced townhouse.
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# ? Feb 14, 2023 02:32 |
It is a little ridiculous that the zoning laws require an exclusive pathway to each entrance, and to the garage though. Front/Back duplexes are more used for lots with limited space, or for corner lots (where the front of a house is more flexible). If I had to do a duplex on a narrow lot I might go for a upstairs downstairs split, but at that point you're just building a SFH, with basement suite with extra steps.
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# ? Feb 14, 2023 02:46 |
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Some pages ago, Femtosecond was talking about the new duplex zoning/permitting laws allowed in Vancouver, saying that there hadn't been much uptake. At least in my neighbourhood, that seems to be basically all the new construction happening right now, and a few of those units are coming on the market. We actually went to one open house just to see. Basically there's like some sort of "party wall agreement" around shared things. Enormously common out east, more rare here in BC where people are more familiar with stratas. I actually have some friends that bought one of these as their family got bigger and there really wasn't much affordable that was family sized around for sale. Not the sort of folks that would be ok with buying a lead paint filled olde "affordable" house and doing a massive reno. IMO it was a good idea for them, but yea I was kind of taken aback and depressed by how small it was. Lots of money put into surface level irrelevant finishings to try to seem like the price is justified. The big problem here is that the City of Vancouver won't let duplexes be bigger than a regular house, and so they're capped on floor space and oh so weirdly small. It's a huge shame because the result is substandard artificially small housing purely to retain some subjective aesthetic values that regular people probably wouldn't even notice. PT6A posted:Land value continues to be a significant issue. You're mostly paying for where the land is, not the poo poo that's built on top of it, and nothing is being done to address that issue by making more land more valuable. Yeah $1.4M is pretty much land value only in East Van. The only thing that is viable for developers is a property with an absolute teardown worth nothing. Nothing will ever make land less valuable (ok barring catastrophic recessionary impacts). It is only possible to make housing on the land more affordable but subdividing the land further. I mean policy alone won't drive prices down. City of Vancouver did drive down the price of DTES land, but that's only by rezoning it such that you could literally only build housing for the homeless on it. A similar trick won't help regular home buyers. MickeyFinn posted:I don't really follow what is going on here. Is this one building with two units with one in the front and one in the back? Are there garages on both sides? What is the benefit of this? Making sure that neighbors only see buildings that look like single family homes? Ding ding ding. Yes Vancouver Planners will buckle that quickly to weirdo nimby SFH owner sentiments. I think this might have finally changed after years of builders begging to get rid of this rule qhat posted:1.5million for half a house. Amazing. Think I'll keep renting actually. Pretty soon it'll be 1.5M for 1/4 of a house. Buy Now Or Be Priced Out Forever. Vancouver is currently doing some consultation on allowing (gasp) fourplexes on a single lot. Only 1.0 FSR so like the duplexes posted by Lead out in Cuffs, they'll be woefully small. A local builder tweeted out a possible design. https://twitter.com/Lanefab/status/1624542801085202432?s=20&t=Zmf8o25VBcCqZxia3Hk9cw Hadn't thought of it before but I wonder what the fourplex stuff will mean for the duplexes... Might mean they need to revise the duplex zoning too to make them more compelling if the city wants duplexes to still be a somewhat possible option for builders and not have everything only be fourplexes. Femtosecond fucked around with this message at 04:57 on Feb 14, 2023 |
# ? Feb 14, 2023 04:47 |
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Highly relevant to our discussion around those pre-sale buyers getting turbo hosed a few days ago, I was reading about the dynamics of Seattle's weirdo housing market, where developers have almost entirely abandoned building condos in favour of purpose built rental, and man look what I found as one of the causes:quote:.... Basically condo pre-sales are not good for raising revenue in Seattle so developers shrugged and stopped building condos. Whoooops. Shows how hard it must be to engineer this perfect balance of housing tenure types. Up here we have the opposite issue, where condos are most profitable so developers piled into that and built no PBRs. Developers are gonna pile into whatever it is that's the most profitable thing. I have no idea how to fix this other than I dunno constant policy tinkering to try to make both PBR and condos viable.
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# ? Feb 14, 2023 05:22 |
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1.5 million for that. Vancouver is wild. I never really followed housing prices while we were there so this is fun. I'm not going to say Ottawa is cheap but you can get a whole-rear end detached home (small) for under 600k depending on where you look. And it won't be a shitpile.
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# ? Feb 14, 2023 14:50 |
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Living in a city sounds like poo poo
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# ? Feb 14, 2023 14:52 |
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Professor Shark posted:Living in a city sounds like poo poo It's second only to not living in a city.
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# ? Feb 14, 2023 15:02 |
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Happy 10th birthday, thread! In the first post a $508k house and $326k condo in Toronto was considered expensive.
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# ? Feb 14, 2023 15:03 |
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Professor Shark posted:Living in a city sounds like poo poo Fidelitious posted:It's second only to not living in a city. i've lived in the largest city in canada, a village of <1k people, and several towns and cities in between. it's all poo poo, all of it.
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# ? Feb 14, 2023 15:11 |
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Powershift posted:Happy 10th birthday, thread! Adjusted for inflation, those are $634,000 and $407,000. Corrections back to those levels aren't completely out of the question, since people buying Toronto real estate are more constrained by their actual wealth and actual income than they've been at any point since 2008.
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# ? Feb 14, 2023 15:21 |
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Femtosecond posted:Highly relevant to our discussion around those pre-sale buyers getting turbo hosed a few days ago, I was reading about the dynamics of Seattle's weirdo housing market, where developers have almost entirely abandoned building condos in favour of purpose built rental, and man look what I found as one of the causes: Building different kinds of housing requires some inefficiency in deploying capital to build housing, because some of the housing will not be maximally profitable. The only way to do that is to have the government intervening in the market constantly by shifting zoning and laws like the one brought up here to make price discovery an evergreen process.
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# ? Feb 14, 2023 15:56 |
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quote:New report predicts Canadian home prices could drop by 30% — or more Ah so basically the "worst case scenario" is to decline to just before pandemic prices. lolol. cool. Since the only correct guess this entire thread has been doubling down on "housing go up" I'm going to bet that we will see a V shaped recovery that quickly restores us to pandemic era lofty prices.
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# ? Feb 14, 2023 18:05 |
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Femtosecond posted:Ah so basically the "worst case scenario" is to decline to just before pandemic prices. lolol. cool. Well, a 50% drop is more than a 50% gain. 1.0 -> 1.5 -> 0.75. So a 30% drop would get us roughly back to pre-pandemic (1.5 -> 1.05), but here's hoping for The Big One.
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# ? Feb 14, 2023 18:26 |
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Femtosecond posted:Since the only correct guess this entire thread has been doubling down on "housing go up" I'm going to bet that we will see a V shaped recovery that quickly restores us to pandemic era lofty prices. Today's policy rate is the highest it's been since the thread was created. In fact, it's as high as it's been for 90% of Something Awful's existence. If we're lucky and inflation gets back under control because we have a massive loving recession, we might see last summer's rate by mid-2025.
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# ? Feb 14, 2023 18:51 |
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I’ve always been of the opinion that recessions take longer to happen than you think and often happen faster than you’d like. I fully do not believe the nonsense that people will be priced out forever if they don’t buy now and never will, it’s just not a narrative that actually makes sense. It’s also the exact kind of poo poo that RE industry people want you to believe because it keeps the gravy train going for another year or so.
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# ? Feb 14, 2023 19:12 |
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qhat posted:I’ve always been of the opinion that recessions take longer to happen than you think and often happen faster than you’d like. I fully do not believe the nonsense that people will be priced out forever if they don’t buy now and never will, it’s just not a narrative that actually makes sense. It’s also the exact kind of poo poo that RE industry people want you to believe because it keeps the gravy train going for another year or so. Even if people fully bought in that they mustbuy now or else, they can't. The qualifications isn't there at these rates. It's a game of chicken on who will blink first and either lower the price or agree to pay more. But, for now, buyers aren't able to blink even if they wanted to. Rich cash buyers not included obviously.
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# ? Feb 14, 2023 22:53 |
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My prediction, based on the 10+ years of experience in amateur prognostication, is that nobody seems to have any idea what's going to happen. The smart money is to bet against Jim Cramer, but this is the only opinion of his I found on Canadian housing: https://twitter.com/jimcramer/status/1366524540151623691 I don't know what willing to have your mom slagged means, Jim.
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# ? Feb 14, 2023 23:12 |
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# ? Jun 8, 2024 04:56 |
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Purgatory Glory posted:Even if people fully bought in that they mustbuy now or else, they can't. The qualifications isn't there at these rates. It's a game of chicken on who will blink first and either lower the price or agree to pay more. But, for now, buyers aren't able to blink even if they wanted to. Rich cash buyers not included obviously. This is what makes it frustrating. It's just incredibly annoying to plug all of our numbers into a bank's mortgage calculator and come up with a number that, at the present moment, is above the list price of all but one house in our neighborhood. I suppose we could sell all of our investments to get a bigger down payment, but why would we put all of our money into an asset that's probably not going to return to today's inflation-adjusted prices, and certainly won't return to last year's inflation-adjusted prices, in our lifetime? There's never been a huge supply of would-be owner-occupiers who don't need financing waiting in the wings, because they've already bought what they want. Who do these sellers think they're waiting for?
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# ? Feb 15, 2023 01:41 |