Who knew that the roadblocks erected over the years that made housing progressively more expensive would now be trumpeted as the savior of the housing market? In the topsy-turvy world of the left-wing corporate media, this hash is what passes for analysis these days.
Canada’s housing agency has cut its national home price forecast for this year and next, saying that interest rates were rising faster than it anticipated – but the agency is not predicting a sharp correction because it said a housing shortage will support prices.
“I have trouble believing in a very big price correction,” Mr. Dugan said. “I don’t want to say that it can’t happen. It is possible for a 10-per-cent price correction like some people are saying. But I’m just leery of that because of the supply shortage,” he said.
I’m pretty certain that various American government agencies made similar predictions in or around 2008.
When the bubble bursts, it will be the fault of the bad men who raised interest rates. You can say mean things to them in meetings then. Maybe insult them at dinner, or at the theatre.
It’ll be a 40% drop minimum. Possibly even 50-60%. There’s rumours already circulating that Trudeau might roll the dice in the fall to get it over with before the big recession that’s coming.
When nobody buys homes at these inflated prices … the value drops. Period. It’s how a free … consumer-driven … marketplace works. That shrinkflated box of wheat thins is gonna STAY on the Safeway shelf when they price it at $4.59/box. It ain’t gonna get bought. Same with unaffordable house prices. When everyone’s out of work … cause EVERYTHING is too expensive … the consumer shifts to fail safe hunker down mode. And very little gets bought.
I don’t trust economic forecasts.
No one might bother to ask why we have a housing shortage, while at the same time, there are so many programs to address “housing affordability” which actually just raise the price of housing, because sellers are aware of them too…
So there aren’t enough houses for the current citizenry, hence the high prices, and with inflation, the possibility of getting a mortgage is just about out of reach for most people needing one. And the economists are worried about the market value remaining stable while the Liberal / NDP wants to increase the problem by another 400,000 people this year alone, not counting the Roxbury Road illegals? Our current leadership are malevolent children looking to become dictators and they don’t give a tinker’s dam about the citizens.
I’m sure that much of the blame lies with the government.
I inherited my father’s house and, shortly after he died, I had it appraised to establish a fair market value for tax purposes. The B. C. government, however, assessed it was worth on the order of 20% more, claiming that “similar” houses in “similar” neighbourhoods were going for those higher prices.
Uh, not quite. The house was more than 50 years old and, while I still owned it, was in serious need of a lot of maintenance and repairs, such as for cracks in the basement walls that developed over time, allowing water to seep through them (how about 1 gal/6 hours?).
The provincial government never set foot in the yard, never looked at or in the house, but it decided how much it was worth from a distance. So, who was right?
I read a paper by an economist about 15 years ago who said that at the time it took a developer over 10 years to go from land purchase to getting shovels in the ground. All of this was due to regulation overload by all levels of government, municipalities adding new terms to agreements after every election, and so on while the developer has to sit on the mortgage, paying legal fees, and doing multiple redundant reports, assessments, studies. If you cut the overload you could cut the wait time in half and save roughly 40% on the cost of new housing. Then make building rental apartments more attractive than condos and you could solve that problem as well.
Million dollar houses for people on McDonalds budgets. Sounds like Canada.