Current score: 4 (to vote for this comment, please visit the site)

Don’t forget that when the economy gets better, interest rate will start rising. With prime back up to 6-7%, many people cannot afford their payments. I don’t think the real estate market will recover for at least 10 yrs.

Current score: 5 (to vote for this comment, please visit the site)

Who cares what the ‘REAL’(inflation adjusted) value is….people only care about todays’ value ’cause their paid in today’s dollars!

What frickin’ loon…..

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So it will be very interesting to see where we sit with rental rates this fall. I’m not betting against increased rents, myself. Who would be moving from renter to owner in this market? Well some people, obviously, but most of us renters aren’t happy to do that knife catching trick.

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If anyone here listened to him last summer they’d be out $150k!

When you see a post from Dave click the down arrow and move along, there is no value to reading it’s crap.

Current score: 9 (to vote for this comment, please visit the site)

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You and your anonymous sparing partner could both be right. CMHC tracks purpose-built rentals exclusively, does it not? Hollyburn is unlikely to drop rents substantially, and will probably raise them on current tenants on the assumption that people would rather pay a bit more than move. So there is your official CMHC rent increase. Investors renting out individual houses or condos are an entirely different category though, and this is where the real rental softness appears to be. There was that one Shangri-La posting here a few months back at just under $2/sf, for instance. That is Vancouver’s new hotness for cheaper than much of Hollyburn’s old and busted. But CMHC won’t notice.

Current score: 6 (to vote for this comment, please visit the site)

#73 Observer, maybe those flickers of light are reflections coming off the fools running up the tunnel who are wearing mirrors on the backs of thier heads due to thier inane propensity to constantly look backwards. Getting closer you may see a few bumper stickers which read ” Don’t follow me , I’m lost”.

Obviously the deniers and the whoreish MSM believe that you can be herded when afraid. They seem to think that by sending out counterindicatory farts of nonsense gas that you may somehow stop believing what you see and instead start believing what they would have you believe.

The facts prove that the real estate market is in a death spiral. There are many parties whose survival depends on your not believing that. They are desperatley trying to disuade you thinking clearly and so obfuscate the facts and spin the stories into ridiculous disparate nonsense. It’s an attempt at sewing confusion, they believe it may work long enough to get themselves out the jam they are in.

We are in a war, they want you to lose.

Current score: 7 (to vote for this comment, please visit the site)

Yesterday saw in CBC about real estate prices in different parts of US. Florida- 2yr old 4 bedroom house with swimming pool down to $95000 from $350,000. There was another town near Detroit where foreclosures were selling for few thousand dollars (5000-20000).

When there are no jobs, no one can afford mortgage, condo fee, taxes, insurance.

Lets wait until the job front gets better-then decide whether to buy or not.

Current score: 9 (to vote for this comment, please visit the site)

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The Landlords are desperate, the economy is in the toilet and they are losing money so fast they just want to cut the bleeding.

Show up with references and cheques and tell them you are ready to make a deal and you can probably get a 2 bedroom for $1600.

Current score: 12 (to vote for this comment, please visit the site)

If anyone here listened to him last summer they’d be out $150k!

When you see a post from Dave click the down arrow and move along, there is no value to reading it’s crap.

Current score: 13 (to vote for this comment, please visit the site)

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Even Dr. Doom himself (Roubini) thinks we have seen the worst of the contraction and that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

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WASHINGTON – Home prices sank by the sharpest annual rate on record in January, and the pace continues to accelerate, but there were a handful battered metro areas where price declines slowed, according to data released Tuesday.

The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index of home prices in 20 major cities tumbled by a record 19 percent from January 2008. It was the largest decline since the index started in 2000. The 10-city index dropped 19.4 percent, also a new record.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/200.....ome_prices

Current score: 8 (to vote for this comment, please visit the site)

Sounds like wishful thinking to me. 20%? Not a chance.

Rents for new condos have been growing at about 4-5% the last few years. A lot of RE bears will quote anecdotes about falling prices and I have no reason to disbelieve them. That said, I am not inclined to believe that anecdotes demonstrate the real trend. And, I have yet to see anybody produce real data showing that rents are falling. If you look at past trends in the last 35 years, you will see that prices never dropped in nominal terms.

Current score: -20 (to vote for this comment, please visit the site)

Probably that bit? (That’s silly. Lenin – and even more Marx – were great thinkers, so many non-communists will find some merit in their ideas. Marx foresaw the rise of the multinational corporations, for example, and that would be valid information for a budding trade unionist OR a budding industrial titan.)

But he’s obviously criticizing socialist policy (and what he’s saying could be applied to now):

“In the latter stages of the war all the belligerent governments practiced, from necessity or incompetence, what a Bolshevist might have done from design . Even now, when the war is over, most of them continue out of weakness the same malpractices . But further, the governments of Europe, being many of them at this moment reckless in their methods as well as weak, seek to direct on to a class known as “profiteers” the popular indignation against the more obvious consequences of their vicious methods.

These “profiteers” are, broadly speaking, the entrepreneur class of capitalists, that is to say, the active and constructive element in the whole capitalist society, who in a period of rapidly rising prices cannot but get rich quick whether they wish it or desire it or not . If prices are continually rising, every trader who has purchased for stock or owns property and plant inevitably makes profits…. Business loses its genuine character and becomes no better than a speculation in the exchanges, the fluctuations in which entirely obliterate the normal profits of commerce….

__________________

Sounds like now…speculation instead of real production. It’s not good for a functioning free market, and we’ve been tricked into organizing our economy around cheap condos!

You could substitute “flippers” for “profiteers” and replace “war” with “bubble” and reprint that!

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0.9 is bullshit as was pointed out this morning when it was announced that CDN GDP shaank 3.4% in the 4th Q of 08 alone, annualized thats 13.6% and far higher than the GOC forecast of -3% ( and a laughable 3.8% 09 rebound) and worse than even the Parliamentary Budget office forecast of -8.5%. Bottom line, no matter how it’s spun out by the MSM whores et al , the truth comes out eventually proving that it’s much worse than they’re letting on.

“Millan Mulraine, economics strategist at TD Securities, said “there is no getting away from the fact that the Canadian economy is in the depths of a rather profound economic recession, and from the evidence so far this year, it clearly appears that the economy may have taken a dramatic turn for the worse.”

Many economists have lowered their outlook for the first quarter of this year to reflect a contraction in GDP of between six and nine per cent. The economy shrank 3.4 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2008.”

http://www.vancouversun.com/bu.....story.html

Current score: 4 (to vote for this comment, please visit the site)

I’m keeping myself on a tight budget as I’m looking to buy a 50′ lot on the west side once prices bottom.

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“If a man is compelled to exchange the fruits of his labors for paper which, as experience soon teaches him, he cannot use to purchase what he requires at a price comparable to that which he has received for his own products, he will keep his produce for himself, dispose of it to his friends and neighbors as a favor, or relax his efforts in producing it.”

Sounds like something out of Atlas Shrugged, doesn’t it?

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Great time to buy indeed.

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I am stuck in a waiting room for the next hour, so I can get a little more education while I wait.

Commanding Heights is great. Good find!

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Keynes’ treatise of 1919 is a classic and probably later came to the attention of Friedman:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/comman.....ation.html

Keynes is often viewed as an economist who tolerated and supported mild inflation as an unfortunate byproduct of sustained, managed, economic prosperity. Yet this excerpt from The Economic Consequences of the Peace, written just at the end of World War I, makes clear how fully he understood inflation’s potential to destroy the fabric of society. It is also prophetic regarding the fate of all government attempts to control the price of goods by force of law.

Current score: 2 (to vote for this comment, please visit the site)

For the record, my opinion (rambling):

John Maynard Keynes: fascinating, brilliant, problematic. member of the Bloomsbury group, so that’s exciting. A lot of contemporary “Keynsian” economics is actually pretty removed from his actual theories (for example, he didn’t tell politicians get central banks to micro manage interest rates on a daily basis). Paul Krugman is a Keynsian. I like Paul Krugman .

Milton Friedman: His whole Chile thing gives me the creeps. Libertarian. Reagan/Thatcher free market will fix everything…kind of reminds me of true-believer neo-cons where the ideas are very inflexible and must be adhered to 100%. I think his ideas are important, but you can’t apply it wholesale to an economy and expect it to magically work. Too rigid for me. (I am biased against those University of Chicago characters.)

Let’s face it. No economic “model” really works in real life, because people are too irrational to stick to a plan.

Current score: 1 (to vote for this comment, please visit the site)