The lagging rebound

The recession is over and done with, so get out your credit cards and buy something!  We need all the help we can get, since BC government revenues have declined $2 Billion in the last three months.  Meanwhile the CMHC is predicting a National housing market rebound that will see prices growing through next year.

On the flipside, the OECD is saying that everything isn’t ideal for the Canadian economy.  They’re forecasting that Canada will lag all other G7 economies when it comes to recovery.  Critics counter that their model is flawed and we’re actually doing much better than our peers, thank you very much.

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stop the madness

^^ "with a lot of fun"? WTF?

stop the madness

Crystal Ball at work

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Real Estate fees paid by the Buyer!!! (Vancouver West, North shore, Burnaby) (map)

Date: 2009-09-03, 9:33PM PDT

Reply to: tony@tonyfakhari.com [Errors when replying to ads?]

It is time to SELL!!! Don't wait to save the Real Estate fees. There is a shortage of LISTINGS.I can not hold inventory. Your property deserves a lot more exposure and marketing to get the TOP $$$$$$ and quick sell. It's Unknown to how long The market is going to stay BULLISH. Let me assist you in this process and i make sure you receive your desired price, if not more!!!!!

Please call Tony @(604) 618-0224 for a great analysis with a lot of fun.

Details :http://tonyfakhari.com/201-1455-HOWE-Street-mylistings-9139687.property

cashisking

3 houses in Shaughnessy are in foreclosure … chickens coming home to roost

crabman

Keep On Waiting: If you have been sitting on the sidelines, that is potentially a DECADE of waiting – potentially 15 if you wait until the “bottom.” Imagine the dent you could have put in a mortgage if you invested during that time, and the amount of rent wasted for 15 years. Renting is not "sitting on the sidelines". We are very much in the game. Except that we save about $2k/month, don't have to repair anything, don't have to pay the $20k special assessment that our lucky landlords did this year, and don't have to pay $10's of thousands in realtor fees when we move. The government has consistently taken measures to backstop the RE market, so that each time it looks like it might be going soft, it gets some support. First, we had minimum downpayments reduced from… Read more »

Phil

#40 – Great Post!

realpaul

best place on meth:

#58 Quite right, there are 'holes' all over the place but the lemmings are 'buying now' before intrest rates go up or some god damn thing. Frankly I admit to be a bit onto the amazed side of the scale of things at watching the buzz take over in the midst of what is in fact some fairly dire circumstances. Lets see where it goes. Yeeeeehaaaaaaaaaaaaa we're all gonna die !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I stand to lose nothing, and in fact I don't really care, but, I've allways loved the circus.

NO -LYMPICS

On Global:

Greyhound Bus Lines is apparently on life support

best place on meth

First the residential market imploded, now the commercial real estate market is following.

And it's not just the US, around the lower mainland "For Lease" signs are spreading like the Bubonic Plague.

Only around here people are too stupid to notice that something is up.

realpaul

NO -LYMPICS:

#55 NO. I met a guy a long time ago who had been a stone mason on the 'new' City Hall. Thats when they cut the road up to QE Park to quarry the stone from the gravel pit there at the time. He told me that it was a transient camp at the time. Thats some serious 'heritage' allright. Yer right, fn nimbys.

NO -LYMPICS

Global News:

Request:

Will someone please tell Michael Campbell to STFU ?

Oh no, the RE pimps are on now…claiming low inventory and high sales.(translation they are getting nervous)

Didya catch Mobile Home park in North Van? apparently it's allowed use in areas with SFH . Neighbours of SFH nearby are pissed . Developer says its better than empty land till market turns around.

Ricky, Julian and Bubbles , here we come!

NO -LYMPICS

realpaul:

Yeah , what heritage?

Most of the South cambie area was wild bush and forest in the 1950's. A photo from the era shows OakRidge Mall as logged and nothing but stumps.

There are portions of vancouver, North of 41st betwen Cambie and Oak, that show where 1930's house stop and 1950's era architecture start.

Anyway..I vividly recall the Cambie residents up in arms in the 1980's about their "heritage boulevard". Don't get me wrong, it does look nice, but so what, could,have kept a lot of the landscaping and still built an elevated RAV system. It was a right of way and publically owned, and why wasn't it used ?

F'n Nimby's again….

NO -LYMPICS

44 X read on Says:

September 3rd, 2009 at 4:42 pm

“One light rail proponent Malcolm Johnston, says that such systems as RAV require 500,000 in ridership to be cost effective,”

– any evidence to say he is right? he might be, but is there a study to back this claim up?

======

Below is a document by Malcolm Johnston, but circa 2002.

Pg 6 undr "SUBWAY" notes the requirement of several hundred thousand passenger (he quoted 300,000 -400,000)

Its a good read, he was quite accurate with many of his predictions.

One thing that stands out is Calgary's LRT carried 174,000 passengers daily and built for $548 million.

Vancouver's Expo-line Skytrain cost $1.5 billion and carried 110,000 passengers daily.

http://www.richmond.ca/__shared/assets/051302_pg2

realpaul

Anonymous: #51 That statement was in a trade e-publication several days ago, if I come across it I will certainly post it, THX for your intrest. #50, NO hmmmm couldn't we have lowered the capital cost a great deal anyway if we had used the land we already own that runs down the center of the freeway and the Cambie corridor. Aren't those 'transporation corridors' anyway? Why not maxing out the value taxpayers already have before carreening through residential areas at massive cost to the taxpayer? Would that have pissed off the city workers too if we took a few grass cutting hours away? Is anyone not the least suspicious that the Cambie heritage Boulevard signs only went up when this line became a potential back in the late 80's. Thats not a lot of Heritage and a whole lot… Read more »

read on

^^ fat chance.

Anonymous

realpaul:

Where'd you hear that the FED annouced that it was wanting to raise rates by 350 basis points. I'd love to read the article. Could you post a link?

Thanks bunches.

NO -LYMPICS

RAV again… Don'tcha find it strange that the original elevated SkyTrain routes ran through East Van and most lower class areas of Metro Vancouver ? However, RAV line is almost 100% underground throughout Vancouver 's west side. Elevated rail is expensive, but Underground is even more. The YVR Airport portion of RAV, to my understanding, was paid for by YVR, and duly note is literally the only portion "at grade". Looks like YVR had a choice and chose a cheaper "at grade" system for its portion . IMHO, Metro Vancouver taxpayers are HEAVILY subsidizing the Van West side (Cambie area) by effectively paying to bury and hide RAV so as to maintain a high premium value on surrounding Cambie properties and allow developers carte blanche to build expensive hi rises. BTW this is not a rumour, it is fact, given… Read more »

NO -LYMPICS

http://thebernermonologues.blogspot.com/2008_02_0… DELTA, BC February 4 (2008)– The Light Rail Committee has called for the immediate resignation of BC Transportation Minister, Kevin Falcon. This follows what the LRC says were misleading, politically-motivated statements made last Friday, during Falcon's re-announcement of the Evergreen Line. "The Minister's claims are not supported by modern, global, transportation knowledge," said LRC Chairman, Malcolm Johnston. "SkyTrain – Falcon's automated, driverless, light-metro transit system – does not carry more people. It is not faster and worse, it actually costs more to operate than modern light-rail transit, not less," Johnston emphasised. The LRC points out that, in 1993, GVRD reported an annual subsidy for SkyTrain of $157 million. Since the opening of the Millennium Line, the annual subsidy quietly paid to support the proprietary light-metro has risen to over $200-million a year. "Yet again, we hear an unelected, unaccountable… Read more »

NO -LYMPICS

Re Malcolm Johnston http://www.sfu.ca/~jwbuker/rail/mdj1.html Light Rail for the Valley: Mission Not Accomplished (by Malcolm Johnston) The need for modern light rail, to connect downtown Vancouver, Surrey, Langley, Abbotsford and Chilliwack has never been greater. Increasing population, with increased auto congestion and associated pollution, demands action now, not in 2010, not in 2020. The provincial government's love affair with the obsolete SkyTrain light-metro is puzzling, especially when proprietary SkyTrain has been rejected by city after city ever since SkyTrain was first marketed in the late 1970's. We can today build, as other cities are, up to 10 km. of modern LRT, for the cost of single km. of Bombardier's SkyTrain. To put that in local terms — For the cost of the 10 km. extension of the Surrey SkyTrain line – currently being proposed by Minister Falcon and his appointed, closed-door… Read more »

oneangryslav2

NO -LYMPICS: I've read Malcolm Johnston's stuff ad nauseum and he is simply ill-informed about many things. It is absolutely false that a Canada Line-like system needs to attract anywhere close to 500,000 passengers to be in the black. He is talking about conventional subway systems, which Canada Line is not. And do you not think that, regarding profitability, it makes a difference whether the line is 15km or 50km long? Isn't he the guy who claimed that we could build 200km of LRT for 2 billion dollars (i.e., the cost of the Canada Line)? That would be 10 million/km. That is complete B.S. Check out some of the LRT extensions being built in Calgary, Toronto, and the one just completed in Seattle. The cost per km. is closer to $100 million than $10 million. I'm not so naive to… Read more »

r_j_b

oneangryslav2:

You think that's bad?

There are roads in Delta where the morons put up concrete barriers ACROSS the road. Literally cutting off all traffic. Not at the start of the road either, just BOOM concrete barriers in the middle of a road.

NO -LYMPICS

# 39 D

A " bubble " requires 2 things in sync:

(i) enough " gas " to keep the outer skin from collapsing

(ii)the outer skin durable enough to maintain the status quo and not burst/collapse.

There is more product than the market can realistically support, FTB are being absorbed too rapidly , too many greater fools skewing the market , and many Boomers are getting old and will downsize and flood the market.

That spells trouble.

read on

"One light rail proponent Malcolm Johnston, says that such systems as RAV require 500,000 in ridership to be cost effective,"

– any evidence to say he is right? he might be, but is there a study to back this claim up?

/dev/null

D: Like any market, sometime there will be a significant correction. But to say that is happening around the corner is being pretty arrogant to think that you are smarter than everyone else. If it was really that obvious, lots more people would be trying to sell and less people would be trying to buy. Not everyone is as dumb as you think they are.

I totally agree, D. Once there are significant corrections in other housing around the world then maybe we could consider that it might happen here. But until that happens and we hear about it through, you know, international media coverage, we're all just wasting our time with hypotheticals.

NO -LYMPICS

oneangryslav2 FYI: There used to be a light rail transit sytem throughout the Metro Vancouver area. It even went down to Chilliwack. In Richmond, it used the swing bridge belwo the Oak Stret bridge, then ran down Garden City, turned at the bend down Granville then down Railway to Steveston. This was shut down in 1958, and the tracks pulled up in mid 1960's . The right of way was paved over (and now is the South bound land of Garden City Rd and the West bound lane of Granville. One light rail proponent Malcolm Johnston, says that such systems as RAV require 500,000 in ridership to be cost effective, otherwise they end up in massive subsidies aka the average taxpayer pays more. RAV projections are in the low 100,000 range, this is simply a black hole/white elephant. Re: Bus… Read more »

realpaul

D:

#39, you have to read this then, yes people as group really are that stupid and they have proved it en masse many times over the course of modern economic history

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popula