@Dave: yeah,instead of spreading fear and resentment those bear bums should find a job and settle down.

A good read:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/top-business-stories/consumer-debt-burden-swells-to-record-as-incomes-lag/article4264743/

@patriotz:

Dave’s a Realtor, isn’t he? If so, he has won many times over. It is perfectly possible to make money out of a bubble. Unless Dave is holds a lot of leveraged property, when alll this is over, he will have done better in the al estate market than I ever will.

@Dave: Careful, there’s another one of those from Pauly Shore with a slightly different ending.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/housing/home-sales-fall-in-may-for-first-time-since-start-of-year/article4265840/

Yatter Matters has the most scariest table I’ve seen all year:

http://www.yattermatters.com/2012/06/who-is-buying-those-vancouver-homes/

Summary: the majority of FTBs are local, young families putting down 25% or less. HAM is 3-4% if that (an urban legend essentially).

Scary but we suspected this all along. The source data is REBGV (and realtors) so take it with a grain of salt. Overall it looks balanced so have some Free Beer it’s Friday !

Propaganda on how the bubble bursting and resulting economic carnage is the fault of the Euro Zone. It’s not often a Vancouver Sun article talking about Canada/Vancouver talks about the prospect of mortgage defaults and uses the term “bloated house prices”:

http://www.vancouversun.com/business/2035/Euro+crisis+could+cross+ocean+Bank+Canada/6787247/story.html

“Summary: the majority of FTBs are local, young families putting down 25% or less. HAM is 3-4% if that (an urban legend essentially).”

Yes I can never figure out how so many people got sucked into that HAM was driving the market.

I was surprised by 35% to 40% of the market being first time buyers. If the recent media reports of a bubble and declines in prices gets through to this group the market is toast.

N: “Dave’s a Realtor, isn’t he?”

i think he works for developers.

@Loon: I wonder whether that kind of survey wouldn’t be very susceptible to inherent bias in the data. For example, how likely would an investor be to respond to a voluntary survey vs. a first-time buyer? What do response rates look like depending on where the survey was sent?

While I also suspect that HAM numbers are overstated, I would expect foreign-investor-non-English-speakers would be a very unlikely demographic to respond to a voluntary survey.

@Anonymous: It’s easy to see why people think it’s HAM: go to any open house in North Van, West Van, East Van (mostly), Burnaby or Richmond. Nearly everyone there will be Chinese.

The difference is, it’s not “HAM”, it’s recent immigrants for whom buying a house is an absolute priority, no matter how they get the money or who they have to borrow it from.

Genuine HAM are offshore investors with lots of cash, and they tend to buy condos and really expensive houses. There probably aren’t many of these.

@patriotz:

“I meant lose the argument.”

True enough. I was just saying to a family member who was mocking me for having been wrong on Vancouver real estate for the last six years that I have, in fact, been right the whole time because it has been true, the whole time, that VAN RE is a bad deal and that prices will go down drastically. They have trouble getting their head around that.

Don’t know if this has been discussed yet, CREA is out with the average price data for Canadian homes:

http://crea.ca/content/national-average-price-map

Average price, May 2012 to May 2011 (Y/Y % change):

Canada -0.3%
Toronto +6.4%
BC -12.9%
Vancouver -11.9%

@Many Franks: Quoth Larry’s post,

“Each month the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver sends out a buyer demographic survey to members who have made at least one sale in the preceding 30-day period.”

That suggests the responses are from REALTORS®, not buyers… and since we’ve been arguing that REALTORS® benefit from overstating HAM’s effect, these numbers should be skewed (if at all) in the other direction. But — this is a survey, and I’m not so paranoid to imagine REALTORS® lying en masse to their own leadership.

3.7% foreign investment strikes me as a pretty small number. It’s just more evidence that Vancouver will reap what it sowed, without a legitimate reason to blame the foreign menace.

@Many Franks:

The survey was completed by real estate agents, not by the buyers, so the buyer’s background would not impact survey completion rates.

@Dave:

Well then, Dave, I would suggest that you sell now, or be priced in forever. Trust me on this 🙂