OK back to RE...

I am not sure how many of you know about Landcor. It is a RE Data service Co, that produces an HPI for many areas separated into Attached, Detached and Condos.

Here's what there say on their HPI page:

The Housing Price Index

This product presents a constantly updated view of real estate market activity in British Columbia over the past two years. You can view trends in the real estate market for BC and areas or jurisdictions within BC that you select.

The Housing Price Index is a new product developed by Landcor Data Corporation. The purpose of the Housing Price Index is to track trends in the general level of residential property prices throughout British Columbia.

The Housing Price Index (HPI for short) covers price trends for detached houses, attached houses and apartment units. Detached houses include single-family detached buildings on lots of up to one acre. Attached houses include duplex, triplex, four-plex, row house and townhouse properties, mostly condominiums and other single unit ownership dwellings. Apartment units, including lofts and artist studios, are also mostly condominiums.

Choose a Jurisdiction and a Property Type and Click the Refresh button to see the graph

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I cannot comment on the accuracy of their HPI, but I must admit they provide a lot more information than you would get from the RE boards. They also produce a quarterly up-date which I make sure to read. Their up-date just came out and is worth reading. Of course many of the comparisons are quarter to quarter.

They have noted what we see too, a major drop in sales but price stability so far, except for certain areas like the Okanagan, where some segments have taken major hits to the price.

Condos in particular have been 'savaged' in some areas, whereas SFH have held up. The start of a trend? We will have to wait and see. Here is a segment form their report:

In Q2 versus Q1 2010, condos in retiree-friendly Okanagan shed almost a fifth of value, off 18.55 percent or from $310,815 to $253,166. In the smaller BC North/Northwest region, the year-over-year drop in average price was 42.51 percent, from $127,339 to $73,206. In the Kootenay, the year-over-year condo plunge was almost 30 percent or from $279,767 to $198,489.

Conversely, SFD and Attached in the Okanagan, Kootenay and BC North/ NW regions have held their ground. Values in both product categories for all three regions posted good year-over-year and quarterly gains.

Condos have been savaged; the more traditional, homey residential product has not. Whether or not this changes depends on the regional economies and, good, bad or both, changes are coming

This link will take you to their HPI graphs. And you can flip through the different areas and segments. The graphs of Kelowna, especially condos, is worth looking at, Vernon doesn't look too hot either. Some areas have not been up-dated, so check the dates when you open the charts.

This is a site well worth book-marking. The more info we have the better.

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Disney Week Coming Next Week

We will be heading to Disney World soon, and so I will be making a lot of new clothes for the kids to wear. Next week will be Disney Week. I am really excited about what I am making:o) There might even be a tutorial or two:o) Hope you will share in my excitement:o) Stay Tuned.....

SHAME...SHAME...SHAME.. On YOU VANOUVER

Normal RE blog posts will return but I am so disgusted by the Pickton affair that I cannot let this slide by.

You all know my low opinion of the local papers- however the front page of the Vancouver Sun made me sick and needs to be read.. This SOB animal ran an abattoir on his farm, killing, butchering and eating the women!

And our bungling police force ignored evidence, didn't execute a voluntary search and turned away tips.

WHAT THE FUCK!!

13 more women died than needed to due to their bungling. Heads should fly. Senior police officers- who refused to accept there was a serial killer at loose and then did a shlip-shlop investigation need to lose their PENSIONS.

We will pay dearly for this from the justifiable law suits that the victims families will file. The idiots that allowed this sick fuck, who should be electrocuted asap, get away with this need to pay too.

And there is NO WAY he did this without anyone else's knowledge. They should be bringing in all the fuckers friends and relatives for questioning. Search their homes, mail, talk to their friends too. Any sign of the slightest knowledge>> Arrest them, and put them on trial!!

If we didn't have a thousand fractured, ego-driven police forces, but a single force and an FBI-like structure (which deals with serial killers in the US) we would have had some arrests. The Royal Mounted are good for ceremonial shows, but we need a highly efficient, high tech national force.

Instead, we have nothing...nothing...

This is typical of our Province. We talk equality but when it comes to marginalized women- the poor, sex trade workers or Aboriginals- who gives a fuck if a few die?

There is another serial killer loose hunting women in the Highway of Tears and the cops only recently agreed to classify it as a serial killer/s.

The truth is we are a sick Province when it comes to crime. We are a drug infested, gang laden, pot growing hole where Judges refuse to convict biker gang members and grow ops are a major revenue provider.

Sick!

We have newspapers full of the Tamil migrants- like they will destroy our perfect society, when gangs kill whoever they want with no legal retribution, when tens of thousands of BC'ers are involved in the drug industry in some way and where we let in wealthy 'investors' regardless of who they stole the money from.

I am disgusted. Sorry for the language but there is no other way to describe what has happened in this case. I'll get back to RE once I have calmed down.

Economy Politic Finance Quadrant

There are 2 BIG main external factors affecting our investment decisions

• Economy
• Politic

When the time is really bad (economy downturn and politically unstable), its best to park your money under something that is really stable, ie Gold. Which is by definition usable anywhere you go in anytime.

When its good time, invest direct to the stock market would yield very good return.

When the economy is not so good in a strong country, the government bonds or related money market would be able to yield higher return than just gold.

However, the most dispute solution in good economy unstable country is investment in property. This is mainly due to easier rental and higher chance of capital gain.

By simply moving money around depends on the political and economy situation, one was able to achieve more than 12% compound return for the past 20 years. That is equivalent to a 10X return.

But by no mean this is easily done. Some of the concerns include;

• how would one know exactly when economy/politic turns good/bad ?
• is Gold the ONLY option ?
• property may not easily liquidated
• how to choose which property or stock market ?

. . . which can be explored further.

Bit and bobs..

To muddy this housing market even more, we have two pieces of news pulling things in the opposite direction.

First banks are cutting their mortgages rates a tiny bit . This is due to the huge rally in bonds which is unprecedented. No one is quite sure why this is happening. It could be due to the imminent resurgence of that whole recession-debt-default-thang which makes government bonds look more attractive, especially if we starts getting a little deflation in the air too.

Here is the US thirty bond yield- ours follows the US pretty closely.

Big drop in Housing sales and the average price across Canada. Just shows how correlated the country is and this is not just a local event. We are in a national housing bubble.

BTW- found a good source of info for current selling price per square foot for condos for Vancouver areas, broken down by size, area etc.

I'm back

Went for a nice trip around recreational property land. The Gulf Islands and Sunshine Coast..looking for deals. Well we are a long way from getting deals as of yet.

Met a few Real Estate Brokers and saw some properties. Even stuff that has been on the market for a year or more without a sniff from a buyer are stubbornly over-priced.

On Saltspring Island, they are sitting on (7 x 4 months) 0f supply = 28 Months. Total inventory/YTD sales. They had a front page article on how the market had changed and sellers need to wake up to this. Despite this prices are inching down v-e-r-y slowly.

The same in the Sunshine coast.

The Real Estate Brokers all admitted things were slow. ('Dead' one of them said)

However they were all certain there would be no significant drop and one suggested that I not bid any less than 10% under listing to be sure I get the property.

Huh!?

No one else is interested but I should still pay 90% of the asking price, on something that the listing agent and seller have probably over-priced by 20% expecting the market to keep going up..

I mention to some that I was looking as assessed as a starting price. This drew some laughs..surely I must know that assessed and market are two separate things...

I then mentioned that:

1) The assessed value is decided by a fairly uninterested party. In fact they will likely err to the up-side, since the higher the assessed the more taxes that are assessed.

2) I had done my home-work and showed up with info on several recent sales which went at the assessed value.

Everyone can have an opinion..but when you back up your opinion with facts it is harder to refute it.

Recreational property has not rebounded as much as Vancouver. The further from the centre, the weaker the bounce back. I think we are in a full-out buyer's market. That is the only way you can describe any market that has over TWO YEARS of inventory. However there is a LOT of denial out there and buyers may find sellers need some more time to come to terms with the new realities.

In fact there are now some listings UNDER assessed on the Sunshine Coast.

................................

As many of you know, I have a special distaste for Conrad Black. He basically threw his Canadian citizenship away. Then he gets convicted for multiple cases of fraud and one of obstruction of justice, and is being sued for unpaid taxes by the IRS.

He then pays enough lawyers to get him out of jail on bail pending an appeal and now he is suing his former Hollinger colleagues in Canada who accused him of looting the company. He is suing in Canada because we have stricter libel laws. Nice to see Canada has something he wants.

Ah will the machinations of the naughty rich never end..

What did Bob Rae say about Black.."that most symbolic representative of bloated capitalism at its worst"

HEY CONRAD if you ever read this post surfing google for mentions of your name..make sure you listen to Todd Butler's song, which is just about you:

Words

Music - click on 'Conrad' if it takes you to another song first.

A Winner, and A Bathroom Reveal

Let's start off by announcing our winner of the $60 giveaway to CSNStores.com.....Drum Roll Please......

The Winner was #4-Mandy!!! 

Yay for Mandy!

I have sent a CSNStores.com representative your email address,so be on the lookout for you winnings!!

*******

And now for the reveal of my latest makeover. We live in a new house, and we have slowly been making it a home. It has taken me longer than I had expected to be able to pick out the right colors, and figure out what design style to work with in this house. In the last house we used dark colors, and it was nice and cozy. This house is much larger and wide open. I wanted to go for the more beachy, cooler colors, so that it would keep the appearance of being wide open. But I did want one room that was dark, and that was my half bath. It's a big change and was almost frightening. I went to Lowes to get some paint. I had every intention of trying out Olympic paint because it has been advertised at $17 a gallon. Much better than the $30-something for Valspar. So anyway, I picked out my color, headed to the paint counter and realized there was some oops paint. There was a gallon for $5 that was extremely close to what I had picked out, so I dumped the paint chip and grabbed that $5 gallon...SCORE!! 

Here is the before:

and another angle:

Very Contractor-y blendy....does that make any sense???

Anyway, here are some After pics:

Without the flash...

With the flash...

Because there aren't any windows near by, there wasn't any natural light to help with the picture taking:(

A picture I picked up from Hobbly Lobbly for $5

The face plate for the light switch and the towel ring also came from H.L. All 50% off:o) The towel will be replaced with something much prettier, but will have to do for now.

I love old books....these came from the hubs' family farm.

I have a plan for the hooks on the bottom of this shelf. Hoping to work on that sometime this week...might be a tutorial in the making:o)

Really needing this verse here lately:o)

So here's the before again:

After

 Not bad for $5, eh? Got another makeover up my sleeve...it involves bead board...that's all I'm sayin'. Have a great Monday!!!