ductonius posted:

90 / 2.5 = $36 per bedroom OR if you delete the half bedroom $45
200 / 5 = $40 per bedroom

What is not known is if the suburban house uses natural gas for heat or not, because the condo surely uses electric. If the house uses electric heat it's *maybe* marginally better, but if it uses natural gas/heat pump/whatever then it is way worse. It should not be surprising that a stand alone dwelling loses more heat to the air than a dwelling literally insulated with other dwellings.

Cultural Imperial posted:

imagine you wrote a cron job to send a tweet at a very specific time of day.

Jumpingmanjim posted:

Why can't the people getting filthy rich off the new train line pay for the new train line?

Also The American Housing bubble is reinflating:

http://wolfstreet.com/2014/12/29/its-official-home-price-inflation-strangles-us-housing-market/

quote:

Alberta Premier Jim Prentice says he disagrees with a new Conference Board of Canada report that says Alberta faces the possibility of slipping into a recession this year because of the drop in oil prices.

"I didn’t find [the Conference Board's] analysis to be particularly cogent, to be frank, and the opinion that they’ve put forward is an outlier amongst all of the other opinions that have been put forward by every one of Canada’s chartered banks and by other respected economic forecasters," said Prentice, taking questions from reporters in Calgary.

"If you take the consensus of all of the other forecasts that have been undertaken, there is a slippage in economic growth in Alberta from something in the range of 3.2 per cent down to something between 1.8 and 2.2 per cent," he said.

"Certainly we intend to make measured, balanced fiscal choices that will continue to keep us in a positive growth mode."

Much lower energy prices are playing out in different ways across Canada, but the Conference Board said Tuesday the impact is likely to be the most prominent in Alberta's oil-heavy economy.

Many economists have slashed their growth expectations in recent months as the price of a barrel of oil has nosedived from $105 US as recently as June to under $50 today. But the Conference Board said the province faces more than just a slowdown — it could see an actual recession.

"Going forward, the province is certain to suffer, especially on the employment front, from the drop in oil prices — and it is likely to slip into recession," Daniel Fields, an economist at the not-for-profit research organization, said in a recent report.

Many provincial governments, and indeed the federal government, have benefited from high energy prices since the recession. But none are so reliant as Alberta. Edmonton relies on oil royalties for about a quarter of its revenues.

It's not just governments that are expecting leaner times. Companies in the real economy that have spent billions expanding the Athabaska oilsands are cutting back.

Late last year Total S.A. postponed its Joslyn oilsands project, while Statoil put the brakes on a Kai Kos Dehseh project. In December, Husky and Penn West both trimmed their spending budgets by billions of dollars. And just yesterday, Canadian Natural Resources, the giant of the space, slashed about $2 billion from what it plans to spend in the oil patch this year.

All those lost dollars are likely to trickle down into fewer jobs, compounding the pain. Shell announced Friday that it was trimming 200 positions.

Some oil patch watchers are bracing for more, as the last time oil prices cratered like this was in the recession of 2008.

"Engineering investment in the province nosedived by about $18 billion, some 30,000 jobs in Alberta’s mining sector disappeared, and housing starts fell 75 per cent," Fields said.

The Conference Board's chief economist Glen Hodgson will be a guest on The Exchange with Amanda Lang on Tuesday to give more details of his analysis.

Baronjutter posted:

Yeah. It maybe sort of used to have a better cross section, but the actual people running it are libertarians who love to rant about "SOCIALISTS" every chance they get. I still go there because it's a pretty good resource to keep abreast of what's going on in the city politically and on the development front, I just try not to read anything political or economic related because it's super blood-boiling. Did you ever post there or just read ?

Cultural Imperial posted:

https://twitter.com/EricandIlsa/status/556877214193815552?s=09

quote:

Two professionals should be able to afford a [HOUSE LARGE ENOUGH FOR SEVEN PEOPLE AND A LIVE-IN NANNY] [WITHOUT TAKING ON ANY DEBT] [WHILE WORKING A TOTAL OF TWO DAYS PER WEEK]! This is a message we can all get behind.

The actual expert advice offered: Eric should work three days a week.

On this Martin Luther King Jr. day, please take a moment to remember Eric and Ilsa and others who are unable to fend for themselves.

Jumpingmanjim posted:

Terebus posted:

Their newest building is "okay". It has wood in it and windows. It's not all concrete. AQ is the most depressing place thought, it feels like you're always walking to a torture room when you're walking through there.

Baronjutter posted:

Who the heck can pays than 1/3 their income on housing? Also all the financial/budget guides say 1/3 is about right, or at least the ones I've read. I'd have to move with my wife into a 1br in the country or a bachelor unit to pay 10-15%. I can't tell if you just make insane money or pay insanely cheap rent.

Coylter posted:

Do you consider yourself middle class?

Baronjutter posted:

We make less than half what you do, should we move into a bachelor to satisfy your sage 10-15% rule? Your rule seems less "don't over pay on rent" and more "be rich". Not that that's terrible advise because there's tons of rich people who spend 50+ percent on housing and have zero savings and massive debt and need HELP god it's hard being rich.

But seriously, unless you're a very high earner or willing to live in a slum no normal working class family can reasonably manage much below 1/3 on housing. We were almost doing 15% when we lived in my parents little 400sqft basement suite, the only reason we have a TFSA really. But it's absolutely miserable living in a cramped dingy basement suite.

Cultural Imperial posted:

Haha I can't believe Halifax is getting a convention centre. Yeah I really want to go to loving Halifax -no one ever

quote:

The chief justice of the B.C. Supreme Court has dismissed the City of Vancouver’s application for an injunction to halt Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd.’s clearing of garden plots along the Arbutus corridor, allowing CP to forge ahead with plans to store railcars on the abandoned line.

CP bulldozed some sheds and smashed through gardens for a couple of weeks last August before it temporarily halted activity on the now-abandoned line.

“The City did not and cannot claim any property interest in the Arbutus corridor, nor can the City assert such rights on behalf of others,” Chief Justice Christopher Hinkson wrote in his judgment released Tuesday.

CP believes the 11-kilometre-long Arbutus corridor’s potential value as a real estate development could be $400-million. The company has offered to sell for $100-million, but the City of Vancouver has balked, countering that a more reasonable value is $20-million.

Condo dwellers who use community gardens, which weave through some of the most expensive property in Canada, say their plots are important.

The judge, however, sided with Calgary-based CP. “The gardeners, pedestrians, cyclists and motor vehicle operators who have been using the corridor have no right to such use,” he said.

While the last train operated in 2001, CP wants to return the right-of-way to freight operating standards and use the tracks again, though this time for storing railcars. The Arbutus corridor is currently zoned for transportation.

Chief Justice Hinkson said CP “will suffer irreparable harm if it is unable to even begin preparations for the resumption of rail use” along the urban stretch of land.

Isentropy posted:

IIRC, we're actuall


They did. It was built in the 80s. At the time people hated it saying it was a huge waste of taxpayer money but look how well it's turned out! It's only 2/3 empty now that Halifax city government leases space in the building and therefore our municipal taxes and fines are subsidizing it!

Our roads are absolute poo poo by the way. Even though that's mostly a political thing, I feel like we could get some use out of $150 million...

Cultural Imperial posted:

Seriously though, have any of you met a single vancouverite you didn't want to punch in the smug face? For all you autists, by single I mean a nice gaussian.

Cultural Imperial posted:

This rate cut has little to do with housing IMO. The BoC is basically making GBS threads their pants because they're afraid of the impending unemployment tsunami that's putting all those tough Alberta bulldoggers out of work.

MickeyFinn posted:

Not that I want to build equity in any housing at the moment, but some of those tiny houses have neat features.

PT6A posted:

Why would anyone want to live in Vancouver in the first place? If there's one thing CI and I can agree on, it's that Vancouver is full of assholes

Franks Happy Place posted:

http://www.cbc.ca/player/News/Canada/BC/ID/2469665470/

OSI bean dip posted:

Yeah. That is the one I kept finding (plus the CTV one) but there was a CTV or Global video that was the original.

FrozenVent posted:

If you enjoy this thread you owe it to yourself to watch Property Virgins.

God drat that realtor transcends self parody. "You only want to spend 500k our of your 800k pre approval? What is wrong with you?"

LGD posted:

Not to defend House-Hunters overmuch, but...

You're aware that that show is mega-fake, right? As in the people on it have already purchased/rented whatever home they decide to buy, and then are paid a pittance to show off their home and two other locations that the show/local realtor thought were cool? The personal narratives are incomplete/inaccurate, and the rationales for accepting/rejecting a given house generally have literally nothing to do with the real reasons anyone on that show ended up living on a particular piece of property. The show is housing porn, pure and simple, and while it definitely has a certain reality-TV appeal for a lot of folks, I've literally never met anyone who watched it who came away thinking that the people appearing on the show were all canny purchasers who were making good decisions. Usually quite the opposite.

Kafka Esq. posted:

I have to say, CI, but you've created quite a thread. It's basically Canadian Economy. Slap a couple of macroeconomic explanations in an OP and a couple links to good posts in the Canadian finance/investments thread and you've got some high quality here.

quote:

CIBC has decided to "selectively reduce a number of positions," the bank confirmed in an email to CBC News Thursday evening.

Spokesman Kevin Dove did not specify which jobs would be cut or how many, but an article published Thursday on the Wall Street Journal website said "more than 500 jobs" would be cut, citing anonymous sources.

"These reductions reflect an overall alignment of our resources that allows us to better serve our clients and ensure that we are operating efficiently," CIBC sokesman Kevin Dove said in the email statement sent to CBC.

The bank says it will be a "significant net recruiter" in 2015 with more than 5,000 hires in the next year.

The bank says its total number of full- and part-time employees is up 1,800 over the last two years, to almost 44,500.

quote:

Calgary’s housing market has taken a sudden turn downward, raising new concerns about the state of Alberta’s economy in the midst of falling oil prices.

Figures released Monday showed soaring listings and plummeting home sales in Calgary, once one of the hottest markets in the country. The sharp slump comes two weeks after Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz cut the bank’s key lending rate, warning that he was seeking to counteract the economic damage of plunging oil prices on the country’s indebted households.

Only a month after predicting that home prices in the region would be stable in 2015, the Calgary Real Estate Board admitted that low oil prices and fears over the fate of the region’s fragile economy have hammered consumer confidence. Home sales plunged 35 per cent in January to their lowest levels in more than seven years while new listings shot up 40 per cent.

Just 880 homes changed hands in January, well below the 1,439 homes that sold in January of last year and the lowest level for any January since 2009, according to the board. Even as sales fell, new listings rose to their second-highest level for any January in a decade, behind only 2008.

The ratio of sales to new listings plunged 55 per cent as inventories of homes listed for sale rose to more than five months compared to just 1.5 months a year ago.

The region’s deteriorating housing market has yet to hit prices, the board said. Among detached homes and townhouses, prices were flat compared to a month earlier, but up an average of 7.7 per cent compared to January, 2014, largely thanks to a strong housing market for most of 2014.

It was a more dire picture in the condo market, however, where the inventory of units up for sale leaped from less than two months in January of last year to more than seven months and the median price fell 3 per cent to $268,000. The number of days on the market also rose sharply, with condos taking an average of 55 days to sell, compared to 43 days in December.

“Consumers are a bit uneasy about what’s happening in the market,” said the board’s chief economist Ann-Marie Lurie. “They see that we’re having these continued low oil prices, potentially having concerns about what’s going to happen to their employment situation and this is making them very hesitant to transact.”

With crude oil prices touching seven-year lows, more than 40 per cent of Alberta oil producers are expected to slash capital expenditures and a third expected to cut jobs, according to a report released Monday by human resource firm Mercer. Already, companies such as Royal Dutch Shell PLC and Suncor Energy Inc. have announced plans to slash thousands of jobs, although employment losses have yet to show up in the region’s labour force statistics, said Royal Bank of Canada senior economist Robert Hogue.

Even so, he said the central bank’s rate cut won’t be enough to offset the economic uncertainty that is plaguing Alberta’s housing market. “At this stage it’s more of a psychological game,” Mr. Hogue said. “If confidence is eroding, I’m not quite sure the Bank of Canada move is going to do much to reverse that in the near term.”

Bank of Montreal senior economist Sal Guatieri predicted prices in Calgary could fall as much as 10 per cent this year as “layoffs in the energy sector and a reversal in migration flows will weigh on the housing market.”

So far the slowdown in the market is mainly affecting high-end homes with price tags above $1-million, said Calgary realtor Josh Nelson. He has prospective buyers working in the oil and gas industry who are watching from the sidelines as prices of some multimillion-dollar homes have dropped as much as $500,000. “Now that news has started to come out I think you are getting people a little bit gun-shy to make that decision,” he said. “They know that prices were high and supply was down in 2014. There are people sitting on the fence now saying, ‘okay, let’s see what’s happening.’”

Since listing her condo townhouse at about $340,000 three weeks ago, Calgary entrepreneur Susan Benoit has received only a handful of phone calls from interested buyers and just a single viewing. She purchased the unit six years ago, shortly before the market crash brought on by the financial crisis, which instantly wiped more than $100,000 off the assessed value of the home. It’s taken this long for home prices to rebound to a point where Ms. Benoit hopes to break even on selling the property, which she began renting out after she got married.

“I probably should be more worried because I have a rental property I’m trying to sell,” she said. “Right now I’m not worried. Maybe that’s naive or wishful thinking, but so many people say even though oil and gas is going down, [home] prices are still going up.”

quote:

First buy some cheap Energy shares and in a couple of years with the profits buy Real Estate again at bargain prices in Calgary.

quote:

My God, look at how sage the Globe's talking heads have suddenly become. Calgary housing market declines amidst oil price downturn.

All bow to the wisdom of the sage Globe journalists who know everything that could ever be important to mankind. They are the Champions...without doubt.

quote:

It's as if the whole country is in denial and if anyone dares to write anything negative they are anti-Canadian. I've noticed for years that Canadians have to be coddled when it comes to bad news.

quote:

We just dont want Alberta to turn into a Camden NJ, or an East St. Louis, or downtown Detroit, or west Chicago.....shall I continue??

etalian posted:

gonna own when desperate seller signs become common

quote:

At a time when she should be approaching her golden years, 57-year-old grandmother Helen Parry is instead supporting two adult children on a wage that hasn’t increased in eight years.

"Cost of living rises but the pay doesn’t and the utilities and everything goes up … so it gets harder each year," Parry says.

Last year, with bills piling up, Parry, who lives in Brampton, Ont., asked her bank for a loan but was turned down because of bad credit.

She turned to a company called easyfinancial Services Ltd.

"I was relieved because, you know, I didn't have any other option at the time."

She got a loan of $3,100 to be paid back over 18 months. But in doing so, Parry dove into one the fastest growing — and potentially most expensive — types of debt in Canada.

They’re called Instalment loans. They are, in a nutshell, unsecured, high-interest, subprime, short-term loans.

A hidden-camera investigation by CBC Marketplace is helping expose just how costly these loans can be.

Unlike payday loans, which are usually for a few hundred dollars and repaid in a few weeks, instalment loans allow you to borrow up to $15,000 with repayment periods of up to three years.

But like payday loans, instalment loans are aimed at the same general market: people with bad debts and poor credit. They often have lower incomes, are struggling to get by and are less sophisticated financially.

In fact, some purveyors of instalment loans are literally setting up shop in many of the same depressed neighbourhoods once populated by payday lenders.

A slippery slope

Easyfinancial Services Ltd. is taking over 47 retail locations across Canada from The Cash Store, an Edmonton-based payday lender that went out of business after it was barred from making new loans in Ontario because of rules limiting interest charges.

While not as high as payday loans, instalment loans also carry rates of interest that can be considered extreme.

Take Parry. A few months after she got her original loan, she got a call from easyfinancial offering her more money with a longer repayment period. Parry agreed and ended up with a $5,100 loan to be repaid over 36 months. Her semimonthly payment was $186.82, which includes an optional loan-protection Insurance payment of $55.97.

Parry's loan agreement has the total cost of borrowing expressed as an annual percentage rate (APR) of 46.96 per cent.

But Peter Gorham, an actuary who provides certification on criminal rates of interest, calculated Parry's effective annual interest rate to be 57.12 per cent.

"The criminal interest rate is anything over 60 per cent," says Gorham. "They’re very close."

Easyfinancial told Parry the total obligation for the term of the loan would be $9,521.90. But under the Consumer Protection Act, easyfinancial only has to include the principal plus interest in the cost-of-borrowing disclosure.

If you include the insurance payment, by the end of 36 months, Parry would have repaid a total of more than $13,400.

Legally, insurance payments aren't included in interest calculations,but if you were to take those into account, Gorham says, the effective annual interest rate would be 120.3 per cent.

Customers often don't understand

A former easyfinancial employee, who did not want her identity revealed, told Marketplace easyfinancial’s customers often don’t comprehend the cost of borrowing.

"I don’t think anyone really understood. All they wanted was the money and they wanted it quick. And then you pay and you pay and you pay and you pay," says the former employee.

She says sales reps, who receive a commission, would call customers offering more money.

"You wouldn’t finish paying off your first loan but you’ve made so many payments, now you qualify for more money. So you would add to that loan. Then you just roll it over."

She says it bothered her so much, she quit.

"I would come home every day very depressed. Like, just felt like we were stealing from people."

In a statement to Marketplace, easyfinancial executive vice-president Jason Mullins said “Ninety-five per cent of our customers rate their experience with easyfinancial as good or excellent. Your story is relying on a few negative anecdotal examples that represent a small number of our customers."

A debt trap

Debt counsellors, though, say high interest rates and refinancing options like those offered by easyfinancial can be devastating.

"For many people, they get stuck in this cycle not for just years but decades," says Scott Hannah, president and CEO of Credit Counselling Society.

Instalment loans have been around in the U.S. for decades but they are relatively new to Canada.

And yet, Equifax, a credit monitoring company, says instalment loans are the second fastest growing type of debt in Canada, behind only auto loans. Instalment loans now account for a total of $132 billion owed, or 8.7 per cent of Canada’s total debt distribution.

The vast majority of that is held by the big banks.

Alternative lenders say their share of the instalment loan business is about $2.5 billion in Canada.

Numbers game

Vancouver-based Urloan, one of those lenders, was offering on its website a $15,000 loan payable in 36 monthly instalments of $858.80.

"I analyzed that loan and determined that the effective annual interest rate that’s contained in that particular arrangement is 71.26 per cent," actuary Jay Jeffrey says.

Urloan says that was a mistake.

​"The ​calculator on our website is definitely wrong," says Ali Pourdad, president and CEO of Creditloans Canada Financing Ltd., the parent company of Urloan. "I think you discovered a much higher payment than we actually charge."

Pourdad says Urloan’s loans have an APR of 46.9 per cent, which he says equates to an effective annual interest rate of 58.5 per cent, just below the legal limit of 60 per cent.

"Yeah, they're high," says Pourdad.

"Unfortunately, we have to charge these rates. It's nothing to do with 59.9, 59.8, it's the fact that we're taking an immense amount of risk. And also, we have to borrow at higher rates because we're a high-risk lender."

Other options

Pourdad says his company is helping people who wouldn’t qualify for a bank loan, by getting them out of financial trouble through consolidating debt.

​"They're going from not paying bills to paying them off. That's where we come in," says Pourdad.

But critics say consolidating debts into one — often higher-interest — loan is not usually the best way to go.

"If they fall behind on these loans, the consolidation loans, it's just like falling behind on any other loan, you'll eventually be pursued for the balance and get calls from collection agencies,” says John Lawford, of the Public Interest Advocacy Centre.

It's better, Lawford says, to go to a credit counselling service, which can often negotiate a lower interest rate.

That’s what Parry did.

Unable to make the payments on her loan from easyfinancial, she went to Credit Canada Debt Solutions.

They got her a new interest rate for her instalment loan: 9.99 per cent.

That, she says, is a rate she can afford.

PT6A posted:

Hey, remember that discussion a little while back about Alpha House and how people were attacking me for saying it was lovely and bad for the neighbourhood? Well, as it turns out, it's also bad for its clients. There was a fire there recently that killed someone, likely due to the same chronic understaffing and lack of fucks given that results in the many negative effects to the surrounding community. It turns out, too, that I'm not the only person who's had problems with them being nearby. For your consideration: http://www.reddit.com/r/Calgary/comments/2yeyr0/can_someone_explain_the_purpose_of_alpha_house_to/

Apologies are forthcoming from those who attacked me, I hope.

Rime posted:

This is basically a former roommate of mine. $55k+/yr at an easy-rear end IT gig, somehow had $35,000 (and climbing) in high interest credit card debt. Constantly complained about how it hung over his head, yet ate out for breakfast lunch and dinner and went out drinking regularly. When he did buy groceries, he never ate a single thing and it all just rotted in the fridge. New toys every month.

Moved back in with his parents at middle-age so that he could save enough to go to Australia for a year, without paying off his credit cards.