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Friday Free-for-all! May 20th 2016

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Oh yeah! It’s the end of another week and that means it’s time for another Friday Free-for-all.

This is our regular end of the week news round up and open topic discussion thread for the weekend, here are a few recent links to kick off the chat:

–Gov terrified of popping bubble
–CREA: Market ‘topped out’
–We don’t need no education
–How to pop the bubble before its too late
–BC Real estate watchdog leaving
–continued acceleration
–Anyone want to sell under market?
–

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

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[…] –Housing market concerns at BOC –Broker Economist on concerns –Vancouver ‘freakshow’ market –Peterborough up 24% YOY –Save for 23 years –4 out of 10 caught short on money –lack of compliance on money laundering –high cost of ultra-low rates […]

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bullwhip29

Alibaba’s accounting practices under U.S. investigation
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/alibaba-sec-probe-1.3599191

>>>been saying all along that this story (much like the so called chinese economic miracle as a whole) was too good to be true. imho with all the impossible to measure sales brushing and dealing in counterfeit goods, alibaba is china’s equivalent to enron. i’m sure there are countless others conducting their business in the same way. everyone here is well aware of what has happened to much of this ill-gotten hot money. we’ll see how far the regulators are willing to venture into the rabbit hole.

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I\'m With Stupid ^

“alibaba is china’s equivalent to enron”
I actually LOL’d

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wwwww

Panama Papers: Vancouver is Canada’s hotspot for secret tax haven firms, with hundreds of addresses in leaked papers

Supplies, supplies, the majority of names with off shore accounts are Chinese.

http://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/1953614/panama-papers-vancouver-canadas-hotspot-secret-tax

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space889

@CityObserver – Here is a quick stat lesson for you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence
Anecdotal evidence is evidence from anecdotes. Where only one or a few anecdotes are presented, there is a larger chance that they may be unreliable due to cherry-picked or otherwise non-representative samples of typical cases.[1][2]

Just because the probability of a murderer wearing polka dots outfit is extremely small doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. However, you can’t generalize from that 1 incident to say anything about murderers in general.

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CityObserver

Don’t worry, Space. I fully understand the problems with generalizing from single cases. There’s a WHOLE lot more that goes into evaluating evidence than the point that weak inductions (from single cases or unrepresentative samples) are weak. It’s a worthwhile discussion if you wanted to really get into it. If someone is an eyewitness to an event and I have good reasons to think that his sensory and reasoning faculties are sound, and that he is employing them in optimal circumstances for them to be used, and has no reason to lie, and if I can also take into account potential biases he would have, then I would ordinarily count that as good evidence for a claim. Such evidence is quite different from the idea of an “anecdote” (as that term is usually used in cyberland by someone who falsely… Read more »

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space889

More anecdotal evidence about locals non-HAM leveraging up in RE from Garth in today’s blog. And we know bears only accepts as anecdotal evidence as gossips right?

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southseacompany

“5 potential warning signs of a Canadian downturn: Don Pittis”, CBC News

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/poloz-bank-of-canada-economy-1.3589267

“Downturns happen. Everyone knows it. And while there were happy signs earlier this year, now, as Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz prepares his latest release on interest rates tomorrow, there are growing indications that Canada’s Dr. Jekyll economy is showing a little Mr. Hyde. Here are some symptoms we should watch for.”

1. U.S. rate rise
2. Housing crater?
3. Oil and fires
4. Failed industrial recovery
5. Banking retrenchment

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vangrl

Cracks? “Real estate sales continued to set records through April – while signs of typical seasonal changes have begun to appear. In North and West Vancouver, sales were up 6.6% and 6% respectively over April of 2015. That said, sales were down from the previous month (March 2016) 10.5% and 20% respectively. It is typical to see a seasonal drop from March to April, though likely the unsustainability of the record sales growth from earlier in the year is playing a part. The improving weather (and gardens) of the spring usually bring an increase of new listings and greater balance. In West Vancouver new listings were up 12% vs April 2015 and 7.8% vs March 2016. Relative to sales (+6%/-10% respectively) this should help stabilize the upward pressure on pricing, though total listings finished the month 32% below April of… Read more »

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I\'m With Stupid

I think there are articles pointing to china imploding every year for the last 6+ years.
Just google China economy crash 201X.
I mean its going to happen, but fuck dont make a prediction when, you will look like a fool like me predicting when the housing bubble will burst.

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Newcomer (N)

“We are seeing examples of properties not selling with multiple offers, ”
Heaven forbid!

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I\'m With Stupid

Two friends tried to buy in two different developments, one in Surrey and one in Ladner.
Both were sold out quickly and when they went back for phase 2 the prices have gone up significantly.

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freako

We are at a point where everyone (except for a few deniers) knows that HAM is distorting the market. Yet no one is willing to do anything about it. If 25% price increases in one year don’t motivate people, what will? The answer is: Nothing.

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CityObserver

It continues to amaze me how vacuous — zombie-like, with the frozen smile and blank eyes, CC and others in the liberal govt are about this. They keep saying words that don’t match reality. They don’t seem to realize how deadly this is.

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Best place on meth

De Jong is making a mint off his 7 houses, probably 10 times as much as his MP salary just last year alone.

Conflict of interest or outright corruption?

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StupidityCheck

Both. Plus, he’s an asshole.

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CityObserver

Hmmn. I don’t know. From wikipedia: Conflict of Interest: “The presence of a conflict of interest is independent of the occurrence of impropriety. Therefore, a conflict of interest can be discovered and voluntarily defused before any corruption occurs. A widely used definition is: “A conflict of interest is a set of circumstances that creates a risk that professional judgement or actions regarding a primary interest will be unduly influenced by a secondary interest.” Primary interest refers to the principal goals of the profession or activity, such as the … duties of public office. Secondary interest includes … financial gain but also ….” Corruption: “Corruption is a form of dishonest or unethical conduct by a person entrusted with a position of authority, often to acquire personal benefit. … Government, or ‘political’, corruption occurs when an office-holder or other governmental employee acts… Read more »

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CityObserver

SEVEN houses?

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YVR

He owns all condos in the Abbotsford area. Probably the worst class of RE you could have bought in the past 10 years. Susan Anton on the other hand owns 4 houses in Van proper. Probably made $10 million over the past few years (if she sells).

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funky monkey

But he is cool because he drives a tractor and doesn’t have e-mail.
He makes me cringe.

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space889

So basically only poor people with no assets can be politicians and cabinet ministers then? Cuz if you own a house and made money in the last few years then you are biased toward homeowners, and likely corrupt!

Only those without any assets can possibly be impartial, right?

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CityObserver

@Space. The claim is about owning multiple properties. Doing all the buying and selling and running around takes up a lot of time. It suggests that someone is in the business of profiting from real estate and not in the business of policy development or public service.

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Best place on meth

Of course it’s not HAM, it’s locals driving up prices.

That’s why Vancouver prices are going vertical while other cities are flat.

Locals, get it?

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YVR

Prices went vertical in Japan and Iceland which have close to zero immigrants or foreign investors. It is called a bubble.

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Best place on meth

Those are entire countries.

Why is real estate going vertical here in just one city?

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tokyorealestateman

Japan has many foreign investors–well tokyo does

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Runawayscreaming

Vancouver is a Freak Show – BBC Radio:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03vcz5j

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space889

See Garth’s latest posts? Foreign buyers under 5% of buyers in Metro Van in a new survey of RE agents about their clients in completed deals. Vast majority of transactions are done by first timers, move uppers, and investors.

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Best place on meth

He conveniently forgets to address where the money is coming from and only mentions where the buyers are from.

He also doesn’t mention that the 5% that are truly foreign are buying in the $3 – $30 million range making them a hell of a lot more than 5% of the dollar volume.

Then there’s the issue of these foreign buyers flipping to one another at escalating prices to facilitate money laundering which many are also doing as new Canadian residents, but with offshore money.

Great job of misleading his simpleton followers once again by Garth, and he has a lot of nerve trashing Trump for using the same tactics.

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CityObserver

Does Garth live here? Does he walk around the neighborhoods, all seasons all times of the day? Has he had the opportunity to notice how they have changed from being full of people and their kids and dogs and bicycles to being dark, with no lights in the windows and the streets empty of people but twice as full of cars, all high end cars, without scratches? Has he gone into 70 or 80 or 90 or 100 open houses since 2008? Has he found himself unable to hold conversations with other people at the open houses because they don’t speak English? Besides they’re an all dressed up couple and he’s wearing jeans and a tshirt? Has he watched as the young local couples talking to their realtors out on the sidewalk get scared into paying 750,000 for a place… Read more »

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Shut It Down Already

Garth has data. You don’t. You have anecdotes. He may not have the best data, but it’s still a better argument than yours. Unscratched cars indeed.

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CityObserver

Whoops. That was me who accidentally gave you a point, Shut. I clicked the hand button when I meant to click the Reply button. It is too easy to dismiss anecdotes against statistics. (I’m assuming that by “data” you mean statistics that Garth is using.) It depends on the quality of the anecdote and the quality of the statistic. Besides, I’m not telling you a little story or two as your word “anecdote” implies. I am telling you what I am experiencing daily and have done for 15 years. I walk around all over the city and I write down what I see. I’m an eye witness. It’s like I’m a camera. Would you say a camera produced poorer evidence than some scant statistics? Statistics always leave something out. Sometimes the assumptions behind what information is collected and what information… Read more »

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Shut It Down Already

Yay, way to move the goalposts again!

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Best place on meth

Shut yourself down already.

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Shut It Down Already

Face it. There’s no source of data that would be acceptable to you to prove that it’s locals driving the market. No matter what comes along you’ll simply ignore it or discredit the source. Because your opinion isn’t based on fact or reason.

You’re just pissed that Garth called you out for what you are.

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CityObserver

He surveyed real estate agents. How many did he survey.? How representative are they of the total population of realtors about whom he is generalizing. What did the realtors use as evidence to supply answers to Garth? Since they didn’t report to fintrac, how do those real estate people that he surveyed know whether they were doing business with a foreign owner? How is “foreign” defined for the sake of his survey?

I hate it when people do pseudo science and then scream loud that they are more scientific than others.

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space889

The survey is done by the RE board, not by Garth. I believe the survey is send out to all brokerages and they are to survey all their agents that made a sale. Granted, not all agents will reply.

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Best place on meth

“No matter what comes along you’ll simply ignore it or discredit the source.”

That’s exactly what you do with every study that points to offshore money driving prices up, dismiss it.

Garth is a shifty flip-flopper, that why I would never trust anything that comes out of his mouth.

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Raincity

Garth’s a delusional individual if he thinks that HAM is only 5% of the buyers.

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YVR

The issue is the deffiniton of HAM. Vancouver has a large population that have made their money overseas who are in fact Canadian’s. These are local purchases. The actual number of true foreign buyers at 5% is probably correct.

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OPENHOUSEMASSACRE

Dozens of real estate companies fail to comply with anti-money-laundering laws

http://globalnews.ca/news/2718172/dozens-of-real-estate-companies-fail-to-comply-with-anti-money-laundering-laws/

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BubbleTea

Are we surprised??? Perhaps this will shame the government into doing something about the situation…. or maybe not.

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Runawayscreaming

Sadiq Khan in the Gaurdian

“There is no point in building homes if they are bought by investors in the Middle East and Asia,” he said. “I don’t want homes being left empty. I don’t want us to be the world’s capital for money laundering. I want to give first dibs to Londoners.”

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/may/16/sadiq-khan-developers-housing-plan-london-mayor-affordable?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Gmai

Vancouver is the World Champion of money laundering!

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space889

Uhm….then don’t sell to foreigners? I mean no one is putting a gun to his head forcing him to sell to a dirty foreigner?? Unless, he’s implying that the foreigners are blackmailing him & his family?

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Runawayscreaming

Uhm… just in case you are not aware, Sadiq Khan is the Mayor of London.

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space889

If he really believes in it, he should act on it like taxing the hell of it while reducing taxes for locals, establish trust funds from the extra $$, build social housings, etc, and/or go the authoritarian route of forbidding sales to foreigners.

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Runawayscreaming

Just a suggestion but perhaps you may consider reading the articles before commenting on them.

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StupidityCheck

Shut up, you idiot.

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Best place on meth

“He also confirmed he was planning to create a city hall unit to plan, finance and build new homes. He said Homes for Londoners would use vacant Transport for London sites as well as other publicly owned land. He added that major employers could be asked to provide finance and in exchange they would get new homes for their workers. “I have met many chief executives and those in multi-nationals who say we have problems with recruitment because of the housing crisis in London,” Khan said. “My point to them is this: join Homes for Londoners, you can provide some of the finance and we can guarantee some of the homes we build will be for your staff.” Smart guy, a lot smarter than our mayor. Smart enough to realize, unlike Dave, that it doesn’t matter how much housing you… Read more »

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patriotz

Gregor has in fact proposed essentially the same thing except he’s asking senior governments for financing. There’s really little incentive for CoV employers to fund housing in CoV because most of their employees don’t live in the City anyway. Note that Khan is mayor of the Greater London Authority which covers the whole metro.

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Best place on meth

Perhaps, but would our bike-lane and chicken obsessed mayor ever say something like this?

“There is no point in building homes if they are bought by investors in China” . I don’t want homes being left empty. I don’t want us to be the world’s capital for money laundering. I want to give first dibs to Vancouverites.”

Granted, he’s still 10 times better than that retarded, smirking chimp of a premiere.

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patriotz

http://www.mayorofvancouver.ca/news/statement-mayor-empty-homes-report

Of course his proposals to the provincial government were rejected.

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marble

The guy who traded a red paperclip fo a house is at VREAA.

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space889

uhm??? Somebody managed to trade a paperclip into a house?? That’s a genius merchant right there…

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space889

@Bullwhip – what you posted about disastrous personal finance has been going on for as long as I can remember now. So far, all these warnings hasn’t produced the “logical outcome” of massive defaults and bankruptcies. So, while they might be comfort read for the bears, I don’t really see it has any effects unless it leads to massive bankruptcies and defaults.

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bullwhip29

completely agree that it has dragged on for longer than most anticipated. this said, i cant say that i am entirely surprised as the powers that be have no choice in the matter but to blow more air in the balloon and hope for the best. from that perspective, this outcome is perfectly logical. the fact is that many hundreds of 1000’s if not millions of cdns are effectively insolvent and only being kept alive at considerable expense with the help of respirators and various drugs. if/when more normal market forces take hold, it will likely occur very abruptly (vs being allowed to happen in a smooth and deliberate fashion) and cause all sorts of havoc for the many that can only get by with rates near zero, interest only payments, mortgage helpers and conditions being as slack as they… Read more »

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space889

@Killarney Family Man – So you own a SFH in Killarney free and clear? Cuz if you are as you say a young family and didn’t have bank of Mom for free $$, you would have a pretty big mortgage and a 30% drop would drop your equity to about $0.

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Killarney Family Man

No, we purchased in 2010, built new, and still have a big mortgage left. No bank of Mom involved (wouldn’t that have been nice…). A 30% to 50% drop would reduce our equity by 40% to 60% but not to zero.

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N G

Off-topic, but does anyone have access to sales data that could tell me how much 3901 Brockton Place in North Vancouver recently sold for? It was listed at $1,330,000, and sold in a few days, so I suspect went for over that. I live down the street so am curious how nutty our street has become. I’d ask a realtor but am not all that interested in selling at the moment…

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Brockton

3901 Brockton Place

Sold for $1,475,000 on May 10, 2016 after 12 days on market.
Sold for $439,000 on Nov 7, 2002.

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N G

Wow, thank you!

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YVR

$1.5 million for that dump. It would be worth about $250K in any B class US city. It will be selling for under $500K at some point in the next 5 years.

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southseacompany

“High cost of home ownership exposes strains in Canada’s housing market”, BNN video

http://www.bnn.ca/News/2016/5/24/The-rising-cost-of-home-ownership-exposes-financial-strains-in-Canadas-housing-market.aspx

“This low interest rate environment has fueled the real estate market to such an extent that many are now finding themselves house poor, living close to the margin with few funds set aside for an emergency such as a leaky roof or car problems — let alone making a mortgage payment on time.”

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southseacompany

“Bank of Canada’s Stephen Poloz is in no rush to adjust interest rates, say analysts”, Financial Post

http://business.financialpost.com/news/economy/bank-of-canadas-stephen-poloz-is-in-no-rush-to-adjust-interest-rates-say-analysts

“Even the possibility of a rate hike or two in the United States before the end 2016 — a strong sign the economy of our No. 1 trading partner is picking up — won’t be enough to nudge borrowing costs in Canada, according to analysts.’

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bullwhip29

Zombie companies are holding China’s economy hostage
http://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-economy-is-being-held-hostage-2016-5

http://science.kukuchew.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/chinese-big-bang-theory-3.jpg

>>> maybe china’s version of the popular US comedy, “The Anbang Theory” isn’t meant to be a comedy at all???

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bullwhip29

5 potential warning signs of a Canadian downturn: Don Pittis
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/poloz-bank-of-canada-economy-1.3589267

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gord320

No problem believing this. @ work guys think that they have won the lottery when they get asked to work OT.

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bullwhip29

Dozens of real estate firms not compliant with anti-money laundering rules
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/a-quarter-of-real-estate-firms-not-compliant-with-anti-money-laundering-rules/article30123991

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