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Friday Free-for-all!

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124 Comments

Friday!  Congratulations!  You made it to the end of the week.  As a reward you will recieve one extra hour of evening daylight starting next week.  OK!  Lets do our weekend round-up of news from Vancouver and beyond, here are a few stories I’ve noticed lately:

–Canadians borrowing less
–St. Johns propping up Canadian real estate market
–Buyers trying to get out of Jameson House contract
–Auditor General slams BC on homeless problem
–Time to rethink your mortgage
–Crime need not impede a sale
–Metro Van neighborhoods with recent shootings
–Economic models: garbage in, garbage out.
–British Columbians bullish on real estate
–When no houses are selling, try a trade instead

So what are you seeing out there?  Post your news links, thoughts and anecdotes here and have an excellent weekend!

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Vansanity

Lily pad:

I think you're right, there are tons of scams on craigslist. Phone included? Who does that? I could rack up a couple thousand dollars in phone charges calling friends and family overseas no problem, if someone else was paying for it.

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Lily pad

Vansanity: Vansanity, that one looks like a scam. Usually when it says dogs ok woof and cats ok purr it is an ad that has been lifted and the price changed to a rediculously low amount to get people to email the scammer.

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IC4

Just looking at the 500 sqft apartments give me claustraphobic heebie-jeebies. Coffins, indeed. And the T4 request is just adding insult to injury.

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patriotz

badnewsbear:

For serious inquiries, please be prepared to email the following: one rental reference, a copy of a T4 or a statement of income letter from your employer and photo ID.

Identify theft, anyone? Who in their right mind would email this information to God knows who?

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badnewsbear

hrmmm $1500 for a shoebox( Kid's shoe to boot ) in the sky AND they ask for your T4????

http://vancouver.en.craigslist.ca/apa/1028870159….

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badnewsbear

Someone missed the memo on the economic downturn and drank too much 2010 koolaid

http://vancouver.en.craigslist.ca/apa/1068013716….

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Vansanity

Umm, ya, the rental market is definately… "tightening"?

http://vancouver.en.craigslist.ca/apa/1055376605….

1brm in Yaletown, comes with everything and they mean everything, 42" TV, Playstation, cuttlery, furniture, $1,050 per month utilities inc. including phone?

Wow! This market will be one to watch, for obvious reasons and for sheer entertainment.

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Vansanity

http://vancouver.en.craigslist.ca/apa/1060138531….

This rental comes with 2 Free Season Tickets to the Lions. LOL! That's incentive? Better than a kick in the you know where.

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hardtimes

VanBanker:

#108 Van banker, The decrease in M2 leading into recession is a differant subject however relevant; the increase in the beta of junior resource stocks comes in advance of a nascent recovery as the market anticipates burgeoning demand recovery. Both are 'leading' indicators but differant phases of the buisness cycle. I was lucky enough to be trading those issues in the 70's and 80's. The profits made real estate look like a real mugs game in terms of percentage returns. Being stuck with a portfolio of non fungible assets during a junior stock bull run is a like having a nail driven under your fingernails, very painful.

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Patiently Waiting

Actually, PaulB made an error with the initial numbers and has now changed them. He mentions that on his blog.

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Anonymous

Patiently Waiting: You are wrong go double check your link and final comment.

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Patiently Waiting

Todays stats from PaulB:

http://www.nvcondos.ca/aPage.jsp?aPageId=8

For Bulls: 170 sales

For Bears: New Low Prices (post-bubble)

SFH only had a median of 480K, with 302K for condos. And this is based on a high number sales for the day. How far back does this take the prices?

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Strataman

Jim: Jim Rents are going down substantially maybe not in basement suites in Kits but for $1300.00 you can easily get a brand new one bedroom condo in Yale town. Having lived both in Kits and Yale town I see absolutely no difference so tell me what is so special about Kits that an extra 10 minutes WALKING to Yale town would be not an option? From my experience in Kits in seems comprised entirely of people trying to pretend there is something slightly special about it? It's just another suburb with atrocious accommodation rented to the naive! 🙂 We payed $1200.00 6 years ago for a rundown two bedroom right on Kits beach, the thrill wears off when you know the bathroom is full of mold and you don't even have a private laundry! (And that was the top… Read more »

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patriotz

Jim:

52 properties for rent in Kitsilano for $1000/month or less:

http://vancouver.en.craigslist.ca/search/apa?quer…

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Jim

All this technical economic talk about panic, but all I know is that I don't see the rents going down for an apartment in Kitsilano. Still looking for 1,300 for a basement suite.

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Keeping an Eye on Th

http://robchipman.net/blog/

"After years of watching themselves become increasingly priced out of the market its like deja vu all over again."

Better call asap and get in before you are forever priced out.

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VanBanker

deathspiral Says:

"The stock market has in the past given an indication of recovery by 6 to 36 months lead time. It would be a good place to watch for a recovery well in adavance of a return to normalcy on main street."

This is one of the biggest myths out there. Please read the following article for an excellent analysis of leading indicators beginning with the S&P 500…

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2007/0…

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hardtimes

Recession Could Last Up to 36 Months: Roubini

He said that while U.S. GDP next year could be zero, global GDP could dip into negative territory.

"We could end up … with a 36-month recession, that could be "L-shaped stagnation, or near depression," Roubini said. He puts the chance of a severe U-shaped recession at 66.7 percent, and a more severe L-shaped recession at 33.3 percent.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/29598949

So, what he's saying is " hello 2012" before any recovery. If Canada needs the US to pick up before we get any buisness coming back our way to fix the Canadian economy then it could be 2013 or 14 before we see a turnaround here.

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Denialisrampant

Deflationary Depression Returns To Haunt America David Rosenberg, North American Economist at Merrill Lynch is talking about a "Depression-Style Jobs Report" We cannot rule out the loss of 1 million jobs in March Judging by the leading indicators – 600,000+ jobless claims, Challenger layoffs up an eye-popping 158% from a year ago, the 78,000 plunge in temporary employment, the record-low workweek – suggest that we will have to endure an 800,000 employment slide when the March data roll out, and a 1 million loss cannot be ruled out. We may have to redefine yet again what a ‘new normal’ is at that point. The bottom line is that a recovery in domestic economic activity is, at best, a late-2009 story, but at this stage, even that could be a fairy tale. One in seven individuals unemployed or underemployed Suffice it… Read more »

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jigisup

Warren Buffet said today that amidst the panic we must excercise patience, for FIVE YEARS, before any balance returns to the market. He describes todays financial situation as a 'Pearl Harbour'scenario. 5 years is a very long time to be unemployed, watch your home and investment values continually sink and listen to people bitch about the continued poverty. Talk about a death by a thousand cuts! The IMF announced this morning that global GDP will sink further this year than at any time since WW2. But that sounds about right from a market psychology POV. Capitualtion takes place when everyone gives up en masse and decides publicly that there is no longer any value, hope or intrest in those particular investment classes and sectors. As long as there are people talking up the market, the surer it is that the… Read more »

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Inflate this

Not all of the late 70s and early 80s were a big bear market, it was a volatile period (75-77 was up, 75-85 was a net positive for stocks). Housing did bubble and crash, but far more regionally than today's global implosion. Anyhow, I agree that stock prices or housing prices or any one "asset" class and CPI are not generally correlated (good CPI table for the US here: ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt). But it is clear that really vicious recessions/depressions in the US and Canada have resulted in deflation or at best very low CPI rises more often than not. If the CDN $ completely tanks against other currencies then we could get big CPI rises even in the face of economic chaos (Argentina, Germany are good examples of this), but that hasn't been the pattern, and I think Canada is relatively… Read more »

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deathspiral

patriotz:

102 patriotz , and yet the stock markets being the leading indicator that they are led the way out of both the 70's and the 80's recessions by about 24 months +/-. Both these periods were a resource stock investors paradise when you could literally throw a dart at the board and pick a winning resource stock.

The stock market has in the past given an indication of recovery by 6 to 36 months lead time. It would be a good place to watch for a recovery well in adavance of a return to normalcy on main street. The first stock market sprint in 1932 was in the order of 48%. The Great Depression was entering it's worst phase at that time.

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patriotz

The 70's and early 80's had one of the biggest bear markets in stocks ever, the biggest bear market in bonds ever, major RE busts in New York, London, Montreal, BC, Alberta, SW US and elsewhere – all asset price deflation – and at the same time had the highest consumer price inflation ever seen in the Western economies.

Asset prices and consumer prices are not correlated.

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Inflate this

I think the reason Japan didn't see serious CPI deflation was that Japan was a relatively extreme (if long and drawn out) implosion against a global stage. There were plenty of other people and countries to buy stuff, so Japan's prices on imported stuff didn't drop much. This time we've got a global implosion. I'm sure there's a country somewhere that's doing just fine relatively speaking, but the big economies are all getting relatively hammered, and the cumulative global money supply has got to be dropping even as governments pump money like firemen. The fall of the Canadian $ against the US $ is one I didn't see coming. But I'm not sure CDN CPI is tied to the US $ exchange rate as it once was; most of the stuff I seem to buy, even food now, doesn't come… Read more »

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patriotz

Inflate this: I think the reason we’re going to have some serious deflation for at least a year or two is that the total quantity of money available to buy anything has decreased radically. We are not going to see consumer price deflation, one major reason being the big decline in the CAD against the USD over the last 6 months or so which makes consumables more expensive, and is likely to continue. The global recession reduces demand for Canadian commodities which means a weaker CAD. Combine this with the inflationary effects of the spending south of the border. Contrary to what a lot of people think, Japan did not see consumer price deflation post-1990 either, except for an occasional YOY of -1% or so. But in fact Japanese CPI rose in aggregate through the 90's. On the other hand… Read more »

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