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Baronjutter posted:I'm kinda shocked people are buying without a proper downpayment. With such a huge income why not wait a bit and avoid CMHC stuff? Are there laws in Canada which prevent the use of Down-payment Assistance Programs? In the US they sprung up when banks started enforcing higher down payment requirements and nobody would take on 100% financing situations, and they became a hit with builders aiming for the first time homebuyer using an FHA loan which was the closest thing to 100% financing out there (allowing 97%). Here's how it would work: The seller and buyer would then agree on a price. A buyer would have no down payment. The seller would make a $YYk "donation" plus fee to a "charity" who would then decide to help facilitate getting these needy people into a home, and the official sale would happen at price + $XXk + fee. The "charity" would gave a "gift" of $XXk to the buyer, sufficient to allow a down payment meeting the FHA loan requirements (3.00%). The fee was normally around $400, more than enough to cover expanses and allow a nice salary for those doing the work. Oh and the government took on all the risk for the loan! Here is a pretty good rundown from 2007 about how stupid an idea they are, but they really only worked by exploiting a loophole in the US FHA loan rules.
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Feb 16, 2013 18:36
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312 posted:Oh boy you guys are going to blow up. That staves off disaster for a couple years but makes it ohhh so much worse. But I was referring to the cyclical nature, it bounces from high to low every year in that graph, and it's not seasonal. Yeah but during the 2007-2009 time frame banks tightened up considerably on sub-prime (because practically nobody was buying any securities not backed by the GSEs). And the FHA rules allowing it was really hyped up as it being a government approved way to get homebuyers into homes. "Look, right there! Charities are specifically allowed for! If this were bad would the government be allowing you to do it? They would be on the hook after all... do you know better than the FHA?" My friends were in the DC market at the time and it was full-court-press to get them to do this. I mean every single person they talked to when looking for a buyer's agent tried to get them to do it, until they eventually told everyone to gently caress off and bought via Redfin.
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Feb 16, 2013 20:16
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Dr. Witherbone posted:So, this just came up on CBC. There are places in the US were people still refuse to properly list their houses at prices they will actually sell at because they have a certain value which they just know the house is worth and it is hard to shake that. Give it a few months until the investors who were counting on flipping the property quickly slash prices to pay off loans before the interest payments bankrupt them. Then it will become a race for the exits with the realtors screaming about how "Now is the time to buy!" and more than a few saps suckered into attempting to catch a falling knife.
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Mar 15, 2013 18:41
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at the CREA insisting that if you ignore Vancouver then everything is peachy. Even I know that's ridiculous. Ignore part of the market and the overall market is better!!!!!! 
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Cultural Imperial posted:Being a landlord in Vancouver is a loving nightmare. Being a landlord anywhere is a loving nightmare. Good renters are hard to find and often know it so even if you get one you have to deal with below market rent changes to keep them from jumping. And that isn't even touching on the nightmares that can happen with maintenance. It isn't like a rental house is some sort of magic money dispenser or something, but people sure seem to think it is.
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Aug 6, 2013 16:42
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Ofc. Sex Robot BPD posted:Point 1 sounds like capitalism at work. Point 2 sounds like something you'd have to deal with whether you lived in the house or rented it. Turning a profit on land/housing you own but don't live in is about as close to 'magic money dispenser' as anything gets in this world, so cry me a loving river. Well, I mean that tenants can let problems fester. A leaky shutoff valve that would cost a DIY-er $10 to replace or even a plumber only $60 or something can easily become a multi-hundred or thousand dollar repair if allowed to sit until rotted floor boards and joists need replacement. Proper landlording tends to be slow, small returns punctuated by pretty massive expenses and lots of work. Yet so many people think "Oh I'll just rent out the house and make $1000 per month! It will just arrive in the mail!". I think it is an extension of the whole "renting is throwing your money away!" myth, with people thinking that they were just paying directly into their landlord's pockets (because that's what they have been told for years that they have been doing) and now wanting to be on the other side of that entirely fictional situation.
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Aug 6, 2013 17:44
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Ofc. Sex Robot BPD posted:I've lived in a lot of rentals, but I've never lived in one where the problems with the house/unit weren't chronic or didn't predate my arrival. Landlords also have rights and can inspect the units when reasonable with 24 hours written notice. Floor joists take a while to rot out, long enough for a diligent landlord to catch it even if the tenant is apathetic. Oh yeah I am not in any way feeling sorry for the idiots getting into the rental market, nor should anyone else. In fact I am more sitting back and enjoying the show.  The next act should be when they get fed up or spooked and try to exit only to realize that years of neglect and no updates craters the value of a house.
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Aug 6, 2013 18:34
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Baronjutter posted:They had to put in about 60k on new flooring, new kitchen, painting, and general repairs. They bought the house for about 280k and sold it for about 350k 6 years later. But I bet when other people (who want to believe in the dream) tell their story they point out that they made $70k!!!  Also... Baronjutter posted:Are these the fantasy tenants from the wildest dreams of lovely vancouver landlords? Yes, as long as they pay their rent they sure are. The nightmare tenant of lovely landlords is the one that documents failings and fires off registered mail demanding it be fixed and knows the deposit rules forward and backward when they move out. "They were just so demanding/abused the legal system"  I do have a question about a practice that I'm seeing more and more of in the US: do you see landlords trying to pull off zero-day turnarounds by either requiring the tenants to vacate X-days before the end of the lease or trying to do repairs that legally should have been done before move in? For example I've been seeing a ton of leases here in Austin, Texas (which has a bit of a rental crunch of its own) saying that the tenants have to move out 5-7 days before the lease is done to allow for cleaning and make-ready. It seems very dubious that you can require somebody to leave yet still charge them rent for that period but since when has "every iota of legal precedent and tenant law says you can't do that" stopped people from slipping bullshit into lease contracts? They literally are charging you not to live there...
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Aug 6, 2013 20:05
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Lexicon posted:Single slices are available for $3; whole pizzas are $150. "You're throwing your money away on singles, man! Everyone knows it's a better deal in the long run to buy whole" "By the way would anyone happen to want to buy a slice of my whole?"
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Aug 22, 2013 03:43
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I know tiny houses are a thing but all I can think of when I see the photos is... "Genuine Little Tikes appliances in great shape! EZ Bake needs replacement heating element." But you know, prices Can Only Go Up and It Is Different Here Because X. Very very nice find.
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Aug 23, 2013 03:16
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Cultural Imperial posted:http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/18/default-line-extract-faisal-islam-housing Thanks for this link, so fun read. Considering that for most borrowers now the real consideration is not what a house is worth but instead how much they can afford to pay monthly... Inflation and interest rates returning to "normal" will really hobble the market and given how thinly traded it is that will have the potential to snowball. What are RE commissions like in Canada? High transaction costs?
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Aug 27, 2013 05:25
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Having private landlords that live locally to the places they rent out is a good start. Very nearby or even next to is ideal but then again there are many people that think that you are allowed to attempt to micromanage the hell out of your tenants.
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Aug 29, 2013 02:47
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etalian posted:Another interesting graph, comparing income vs house sale price: I have a complaint about that graph specifically: it should be median income not average. For example this makes it look like we are below the previous 1995 bottom:  But when using median income we see a rather different picture showing we are actually closer to 2003-2004 in prices (and accelerating upward):  (from [url=http://www.deptofnumbers.com/affordability/us/])
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Sep 4, 2013 21:15
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Cultural Imperial posted:Cool graph shifty pony. Is there one that exists for canada for median income? I can't find it in any graph form but the price to median income levels in Canada don't look good: quote:Housing affordability remained little changed overall in Canada's major metropolitan markets, which have an overall rating of seriously unaffordable, at a Median Multiple of 4.7, a deterioration from 4.5 last year. However, this is principally due to a moderation of the Median Multiple in Vancouver's grossly overvalued market, from 10.6 to 9.5. Toronto sustained an increase in its median multiple from 5.1 to 5.9. Calgary also experienced a substantial increase, from 3.9 to 4.3. http://www.demographia.com/dhi.pdf A price to median income of 2.7 is the historic average in the US. 10.6 is loving absurd. Also that data is from 2012.
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Sep 4, 2013 22:03
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PK loving SUBBAN posted:Good news everyone! MLS says in Toronto we're all a bunch of nervous nellies! There's that word again: average. Very intentional why they are using that term. In short, because of this:  you end up with the average differing from the median by $20k+  The data is from 2001 per this link.
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Sep 5, 2013 19:03
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Corrupt Cypher posted:I've been following this thread since its inception, and I really can't believe the regression hasn't started yet, but it must be coming soon. Don't. The market can remain irrational for much longer than you can remain solvent and the likelihood is that those who have the money to burn have already occupied any positions with a potential for meaningful profit.
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Sep 6, 2013 16:04
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Mr. Wynand posted:The Economist Who Just Won a Nobel Prize Thinks Owning a Home Is a Terrible Investment No, you'll just get the exact same thing shown in the article comments: "Nuh-UH! [RE industry talking points 1-30]!"
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Oct 16, 2013 19:47
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Baronjutter posted:My only question though now is how do I lay this out to family and stuff who say we're throwing our money away and "paying someone else's mortgage!!!" ? What is the math one uses to prove rent vs buy in these situations? I'm sure if we lived here for 20 years straight maybe buying would have been better. I know Victoria has one of the worst rent/buy ratios, almost as bad as Vancouver. But can someone explain this again ? You really can't win honestly, just say you looked very hard at the numbers and renting fits in with your lifestyle and future plans. Keep it vague to prevent them from having anything specific to try and weasel in with. Even if you were to completely annihilate any of the money arguments a true believer in the power of the housing market (or someone desperately clinging to the hope that they didn't mess up by buying themselves) will just fall back to how you don't get the intangible warm fuzzy feeling of owning your own place.
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Nov 18, 2013 00:39
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Rhobot Mk. II posted:I can't tell you whether it was a bad decision for you personally without a spreadsheet and crystal ball. However, you probably could have paid thousands less for your vehicle if you had the access to capital to pay cash. The OEM has incorporated the cost of borrowing into the price of the vehicle, and effectively hidden it along the retail supply chain through the tactics I've listed. Whether they priced it correctly will determine whether they're bankrupt in five years or not. Dealers will sell their cars for, in some cases thousands less, than their 'best financing price'. I found this out first hand. There was a 0% finance offer ongoing and the dealer was refusing to meet my price or even get anywhere near it. I then said "what if I just pay cash?" and the paperwork was in my hands in moments. The change in the negotiations was crazy.
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Nov 23, 2013 15:43
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Lexicon posted:If it were up to me, this wouldn't be legally permitted. Cost of financing and asset cost should be entirely distinct. In the US at least the hint that perhaps auto dealers wouldn't be able to gently caress over their customers via financing was almost enough to scuttle the crap finance reform we got and the foundation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
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Nov 23, 2013 17:36
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Cultural Imperial posted:Think of it as property speculator protection racketeering. Lots of idiots bought overpriced condos in the lead up to the Olympics in 2010. Unfortunately, no one predicted that the winter Olympics wouldn't draw further speculation to whistler. In the years since then, the market has either dropped or stayed the same. It depends on who you ask. True resort towns such as Whistler are a bit of a special case but I'm normally entirely for severe restrictions on short term rentals of residential property in urban areas. And by "severe restrictions" I think they should be banned 100% unless the property gets re-zoned commercial or a B&B is formally established. Even without the widespread tax dodging, they invite out of town "investor" speculation like no other and remove housing stock from the pool of rentals for those who actually live in the city (and who the city leadership is supposed to represent) driving up rent for everyone while properties sit vacant for significant fractions of the year. While a great deal of the opposition to them is NIMBY bullshit (and hotels angry at the competition) I think that short term rentals are an area where people are for the right result for the wrong reasons, due to the effect they have on rental availability especially of the affordable type. Why put your apartment or house on the market for a year long lease when you can throw in some lovely Ikea furniture, pay for the lowest cable package, and make the weekly rent over 2x what the monthly rent would be and gouging like hell during special events? As an added bonus none of the normal tenant protection or B&B/hotel accessibility laws apply!
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Nov 30, 2013 16:32
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Cultural Imperial posted:This is mandatory reading if you want to see someone justify an 'investment' in an asset with negative cash flow and zero capital appreciation.  Holy poo poo that "logic". Cash out refinance the house you live in for $100k, use $90k of that as a down payment on a "rental" property with its own $310k mortgage, and (perhaps my favorite bit) assume that the property will be worth the same after 20 years of renting with zero budgeted for upkeep. All that to be in the red $300 per month in the best of times and $2300 per month if you don't have a renter.
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Dec 12, 2013 21:49
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Also the whole "stability follows a bubble" is only true if the government doesn't go hog wild pouring low-interest money and explicit risk backing into the FIRE sector. It is quite possible to end up with an echo bubble if you are stupid.
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Dec 20, 2013 18:08
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wait, "tenant's maintenance" is included in the rental costs? I was not aware that tenants were in any way responsible for repairs.
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Dec 24, 2013 04:47
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cgeq posted:Which is why we always get our security deposit back in full. I can't count the number of times I've been threatened with having to pay for one thing or another. Was this with professional property management services, or with amateur landlords? The latter can be a royal pain but there is no guarantee that the former will be any good either because I've noticed a bunch of pop-up "property management" companies around here lately. It almost reminds me off all the people who rushed out to get their real estate licenses during the big bubble.
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Dec 24, 2013 14:40
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Have you ever hand wiped blinds? It blows. It is still something that should be on the landlord but I too have in the past signed a lease saying it would be done. I just used a bathtub full of cleaning solution to clean them instead. My feeling is that if the contract says "professionally cleaned" any level of paid cleaning meets that requirement,but when I priced it blind cleaning is like $10 per window for the fancy ultrasonic version unless you have silly large windows. Way too many tenants think the security deposit is by default forfeit and way too many landlords treat it like a make-ready account for the next tenant. I swear this is especially common among the people who landlord on the side who are loathe to spend a dime of their own money and have no clue what a reasonable lifetime for certain things in a rental is. No you cannot charge full price (or any price) for the replacement of 14 year old carpet.
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Dec 24, 2013 22:58
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Cultural Imperial posted:Good news That reads to me more like "Stop loving pretending that gentrification is a benevolent force that is in any way good for the lower class citizens in an area."
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Jan 4, 2014 17:30
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Mort posted:What the gently caress? So as a prospective home buyer I need a reasonable sense of what interest rates will do over the next 20 years? The 30 year fixed mortgage only exists in the US because the government sponsors the hell out of them by insuring all the risk. One of the reasons no real changes have been made in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae is that the National Association of realtors portends the apocalypse if the 30 year fixed rate mortgage is modified in any way.
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Jan 18, 2014 17:27
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That varies so incredibly much from place to place it isn't funny. Many municipalities won't allow building in flood zones so instead the developers just go riiiiight outside the limits and build there. In the US Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac currently insure 90% of loans issued. Then you have the FHA which has vastly expanded in scope as well. All to enable things like the "boom" going on in my current city with median sales prices hitting 4.5x median household income in an area where property taxes alone on that median price will be ~10% median household income.
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Jan 18, 2014 18:18
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Whiteycar posted:The only reason a driver wants cash only is because he wants it off the books. Mostly, but not entirely true. The credit card processor contracts are normally pretty godawful for the cab driver in just about every city I've heard of because they are negotiated by either the city taxicab commission or by the cab franchise company. The drivers have no say in the process and end up eating a 10% or higher fee on card transactions and wait forever for the pay to be sent to them because the contract was awarded in a less-than-ethical manner to a company which is now happily sitting on a captive customer base who by law cannot boycott.
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Jan 26, 2014 23:09
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etalian posted:It's basically like trusting bob the honest used car salesman to not sell you a lemon. Having quotes by realtors in articles asking "is the housing market OK? always struck me as asking bob the honest used car salesman if now is a good time to buy a used car.
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Jan 29, 2014 04:28
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iv46vi posted:Getting a mortgage during the collapse might be a tad difficult so you'd better have some substantial cash saved. Also most people are not contrarian. This was one of the problems in the US Housing Collapse. Anyone who could fog a mirror had been able to get a mortgage so those that wanted a house already had one. The number of prudent "not buying, price is too high" people were a drop in the bucket and even then found themselves either subjected to much harsher scrutiny for lending or facing delusional sellers unwilling to accept that their home isn't worth what they dreamed it would be (or owe on it). Finally, nobody wants to try and catch a falling knife.
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Mar 1, 2014 19:36
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Not Canada but city data realtor real estate boosterism always cracks me up:quote:I actually think new permanent values are being set. Constricted supply in Austin is permanent, not temporary, and the buyer demand is actual real life legitimate demand from buyers who need somewhere to live, not the type of investor/flipper demand that occurred in the sand states during the sub-prime loan bubble. It is just missing the "vibrant music scene", which is Austin's equivalent to Vancouver's "picturesque mountains"
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Apr 1, 2014 19:31
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Baronjutter posted:Austin hosed up their planning and didn't invest in transit when they should, loving Houston is beating them now. Austin has some serious issues with it's suburbs and car-dependent lifestyle that's resulted in a lot of low-density sprawl that's created a very weak and thin tax base that's going to lead to a lot of trouble. I don't know what effect this will have on housing prices, but taxes there either need to go way up to pay for their infrastructure, or their existing infrastructure will crumble, let alone having money to pay for new stuff. I know in urban planning circles Austin is viewed as a massive gently caress up and a ticking time bomb in terms of tax base/infrastructure. Oh it is a clusterfuck for sure. However in-city property tax rates are already pushing 2.75% of value yearly and getting money from the state or federal governments just isn't happening. A house listed (and sold after a bidding war) near me for a value which would put the property tax alone at greater than 30% of 2010 census median income for the neighborhood. A key question is whether the light rail bond package passes this fall and that isn't exactly looking promising. The salaries just haven't been moving in a manner to support the price jumps. When interest rates tick up again...
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Apr 1, 2014 20:00
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PC LOAD LETTER posted:Wuut? Household income is only like $53k while houses are around $300k. That is over 5 and half times the local income! The mediocre to crap infrastructure means that the cost of living will continue to go up quite a bit making it a significantly more expensive place to live in the future too. Where is the income + job growth going to come from to make those numbers even out? Also as I pointed out the property tax rates are very high and only going to go up. Austin really never got a housing crash. The market was lagging just behind the bubble enough that when things started to look like they were going to crash nicely coincided with all the extraordinary measures which were taken to keep the economy from shattering did essentially what they were hoping would happen nationwide and kept the market stable. It wasn't exactly growing but more importantly it was not imploding. As a result there is a bit of a "oh Texas is much more prudent about property and lending so it won't get bubbles" mantra here which reminds me a lot of the Canadian situation at the moment.  edit: median price chart Shifty Pony fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Apr 2, 2014 |
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Apr 2, 2014 21:08
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Baronjutter posted:The problem is our zoning and finance systems basically mean it's either horrible suburban developments or expensive condo towers. It's called the "missing middle" in urban planning. Single family areas near the cores become extremely expensive, but at the same time have the political power to resist any sort of change. Instead, the only groups powerful enough to push through development are massive well connected developers who want to build 30 story towers of tiny condos. The other option is greenfield development farther and farther out from the city of lovely cookie-cutter houses. Both are actually the least efficient ways to house people. Suburbia requires massive amounts of infrastructure that the tax base can barely justify, so basically its an extremely subsidized style of living. Condo towers are more efficient on all fronts, but a tall thin building is very expensive to build as it requires extensive engineering, expensive materials, and a lot of space "wasted" on stairs/elevators. Also development is very political, there's a high cost to all the red tape and political processes to get anything built so only the most experienced and well-equipped developers can get anything done. Back in the day most buildings were built by the people that were going to be using or living in them. An interesting point. It certainly does seem that developers engaging in spec housing or spec renovations will go balls out to the highest luxury level that a market could possibly ever support, leaving the choice for a prospective buyer either "marble bathrooms, exotic hardwoods, and stainless steel everywhere" or "lovely old house that is falling apart" and like competing against the flipper for the latter who is paying cash and has no inspection requirement as they are going to just gut it. But how could you curtail that activity?
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Apr 17, 2014 19:59
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Guest2553 posted:http://business.financialpost.com/2014/05/09/canada-housing-bubble-agents/ made me laugh Completely different.  Oh, wait.
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May 11, 2014 19:00
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Freakazoid_ posted:I've only ever heard this as a proposal or maybe a prototype, and the reaction to them has been pretty negative. What cars actually have these? Congrats on not being poor I guess. Have you ever seen a lot with a sign that says "buy here pay here"? Odds are every car that leaves that lot will have a remote starter disable. Here is a good article about the practice in the US. Not only do they allow remote disabling of the starter (but just the starter, they won't kill the engine while driving) but now they feature GPS which allows the dealers to track the locations of the cars at all times and even do things like this: quote:At its extreme, consumer lawyers say, such surveillance can compromise borrowers’ safety. In Austin, Tex., a large subprime lender used a device to track down and repossess the car of a woman who had fled to a shelter to escape her abusive husband, said her lawyer, Amy Clark Kleinpeter.
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Oct 24, 2014 03:30
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MickeyFinn posted:So, particle board? Its Cross-Laminated Timber. Basically glorified plywood, but instead of using thin 1/8" sheets of wood they use dimensional lumber and glue them together. Here's a picture:  You glue them together off-site then swing it into place with a crane making a house Ikea-style. To be fair it is incredibly strong stuff, exceeding structural steel on a per-weight basis. But it is still wood and suffers from all the natural degradation that comes along with that. Imagine if your skyscraper got termites.
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Oct 30, 2014 04:30
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OSI bean dip posted:Termites are easier to deal with than fire though. Oddly enough wood is actually better than exposed steel for keeping strength in a fire. Steel gets all bendy when hot while wood doesn't. But that's a useless comparison because we wrap the steel of modern construction in nice thick layers of concrete or other insulation. Works great as long as the insulation stays intact but if it doesn't and fire gets right up to the steel then things go poorly (see: World Trade Center). Random derail though. Wood skyscrapers are dumb and Ted talks are dumb (but not as dumb as TedX).
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Oct 30, 2014 06:10
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Lexicon posted:As an alumnus, I often feel disgusted with UBC's constant money-grubbing and empire building behaviour. But then I think "maybe all universities are like this". In the states similar things are happening (although not quite as blatant) and the student body makeup at many of the big universities is starting to shift to be much more international. State schools in particular are being really bad about it because despite their charters generally being aimed at to educating in state kids they make more money on out-of-state students and even more on out of country. Professors are starting to squawk about having a ton of students that can't speak or write passable English despite acing the TOEFL, but the admissions departments smell money and are going full steam ahead recruiting students from China and Korea.
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Nov 9, 2014 20:10
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