You made it to the weekend!
And that means its 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:
–End of the boom?
–A look at bankruptcy and foreclosure
–Alberta anxious over dropping oil
–HAM or BCM?
–Prices wont go up or fall
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So what are you seeing out there? Post your news links, thoughts and anecdotes here and have an excellent weekend!
Wake up!
Grab some coffee and some left-over halloween candy, it’s Free-for-all time!
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:
–Ready to count BOC out of rate hike?
–Consumer confidence falling
–‘red mitten’ benefit from winter games
–Flaherty to give market a talking to
–Housing Analysis construction activity
–Buying Genworth?
–Preparing for a stock market correction
–Can we have some accurate data?
–The foreclosure cup
–Where’s the next property bubble?
–Best places to retire
–
So what are you seeing out there? Post your news links, thoughts and anecdotes here and have an excellent weekend!
Well, well, will you look at the time?
It’s Friday already!
And that means it’s time for 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:
–Sales plunge, prices fall
–The Price Graph
–The Inventory Graph
–VHB daily sell/list stat data dump
–A $10 Million price drop
–You can still get a cash-back mortgage
–What’s the deal with foreign buyers?
–Heroic gov victorious over bubble
–Flaherty worries for US style mortgage war
–Time to short the banks?
–US foreclosure timelines in years
–Bubble Fatigue
–
So what are you seeing out there? Post your news links, thoughts and anecdotes here and have an excellent weekend!
The CMHC tends to have some pretty rosy forecasts for the future of Canadas housing market.
But if all is well, why are they now trying to get real estate agents to hide foreclosure status from potential buyers?
After recent stories about deceptive marketing practices, it’s heartening to hear that a group of Realtors in Quebec have raised issues of an ethical breech after the CMHC asked them to conceal foreclosure status on properties for sale.
The Quebec Federation of Real Estate Boards, which oversees the 12 real estate boards in the province, says it challenged CMHC about the change requiring them not to report on a detail sheet that properties for sale were part of a foreclosure, despite the fact that information is considered mandatory when loaded by brokers onto the selling system of local boards.
“Because the repossession field is currently a mandatory field in the brokerage system you have no choice by to indicate ‘no’, which goes against ethical rules stipulating that real estate brokers are obliged to publish information that is truthful and verified,” the group said in a statement to members.
The two sides resolved the issue by making it no longer mandatory to reflect the foreclosure status of a home, based on the seller’s instructions.
So why does the CMHC not want you to know about foreclosure status? Because then you might be tempted to bid on cold logic rather than emotion.
“Look at what is going on right now in financial institutions and everybody is ratcheting up their loan-loss provisions,” said Ben Rabidoux, a Canadian analyst for California-based Hanson Advisors, a market research firm whose clients are institutional investors. “Everybody expects loan losses to rise. I can’t imagine CMHC is in the dark on that. My suspicion is they want to limit any loss on that hits their books.”
By limiting the information on whether a property is part of foreclosure, the Crown corporation would potentially avoid a situation in which a buyer knows it has to sell. In the United States, foreclosed properties have sold at huge discounts.
Read the full article here.