The shocking truth about the value of your home
By Duncan Hood - Monday, February 23, 2009 - 235 Comments
New evidence shows that Canadian prices could go down, and stay down, for a decade
There are still people out there who don’t believe Canada is about to be hit by a devastating housing crisis, but Riaz Kassam isn’t one of them. For him, the crisis has already arrived.
Last July, he made an $80,000 pre-sale payment on a $1.5-million penthouse condominium in Vancouver’s tony H&H Yaletown building, just a few blocks away from where he lives. Kassam, a 42-year-old computer analyst, who’s married with no kids, expected to move in by the end of 2008. But when he put his current apartment on the market, he didn’t get a single offer. He thought maybe he had priced it a little high, so he knocked a bit off. Still, no offers. He lowered it again, and again, until eventually he was offering his apartment for a full $120,000 less than his initial asking price. That’s when he realized he was in trouble. “We reached the point where we couldn’t drop the price any more,” he says, “or we wouldn’t have enough for the down payment on the new property.”
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Biz fix: Will NRDC inject the Bay with some style?
By Duncan Hood - Thursday, July 17, 2008 at 7:06 PM - 5 Comments
In the money: NRDC Equity Partners, owner of the upscale American Lord & Taylor department store chain, finally achieved its goal of buying HBC. As a consumer I’m thrilled (in a guilty kind of way), mainly at the prospect of seeing my dowdy local Bay store get a facelift and start offering clothing brands I want to buy. I even like their pick for CEO. Today it was announced that Jeffrey Sherman, former president and COO of the Polo Retail Group, is the Bay’s new top gun. With experience overseeing the Polo stores internationally and looking after Club Monaco for a while, he might be able to inject the Bay with a little style.Trading down: Yet another automotive plant is laying off workers. This time it’s Sterling Trucks, in St. Thomas, Ont., which just axed 720 people. I have a nasty feeling we’re going to be reading news stories like that for a while…
Number cruncher: Royal LePage Real Estate Services predicts that the price of a Canadian house will “rise only modestly” this year, meaning by 3.5 per cent. Meanwhile, the Bank of Canada is predicting an inflation rate of 4 per cent by year end. That means after inflation, housing prices may actually be going down. Continue…
