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Is the Era of Rising Real Estate Prices Over?

May 6, 2009

in Get the Facts

era-of-rising-real-estate-over When I first moved to Calgary to work in the oil and gas industry in early 2006, it was right around the top of the property boom, and affordable housing was next to impossible to find.  Not wanting to shell out half my salary for an apartment, and spending months to fill it up with furniture, I decided to go the room rental route.

Little did we know at the time, but towards the end of 2006, the market was slowly but surely moving from sellers’ to one that favoured buyers.  Ones in the know, i.e. people with family members that dabbled in real estate, already sold in late 2005 or early 2006. But the media and the rest of us general public have always been slow to catch on.  And you wouldn’t know, from the construction buzz around the city, to the countless “For Help” signs hanging haplessly outside shop windows, to stories of McDonald’s and Starbucks paying upward of $14 an hour plus benefits to attract and retain employees.

My second landlord, a sweet spinster in her 60s, believed in the power of real estate as much as she believed in the miracle that is modern medicine.  She credited her various real estate investments for her comfortable lifestyle, despite not having worked out of her home for more than decade.  Her piece of advice to any young-uns that cross her path, is the adage that we should all invest in real estate sooner rather than later.  I can’t blame her or others her generation  for their spectacular confidence in the strength of the housing market.  Their experience of ever-rising property prices facilitated that expectation.  It certainly looked good at the time, with housing prices that doubled within a few years.  Houses that were hardly 1,000 square feet would go for 400,000 to 500,000 dollars in certain parts of the city.  The gains were ludicrous.  And the whole town was drunk on the sudden discovery that, thanks to oil sands in their back yards, a lot of them were paper millionaires!

In early 2007, cracks were already apparent.  One of my bosses bought a yet-to-be-built house on a new lot on a fixed price, while trying to sell her existing dwelling.  Within the span of a couple of months between when her house was valued, and when it went on the market, the price had already dropped by 10,000.  That’s the problem with houses.  You have to live in one. So unless one can capitalize on the gains immediately, and move elsewhere, one only ends up upgrading to an even more over-valued house.  Luckily, the housing boom in Canada, even western Canada, still paled in comparison to what went on in California, the UK, and Spain.  Even the sharpest decline was contained within teen digits.  But for the people that bought into the perpetual rise of property value, is the current market decline a temporary setback, or something that will linger indefinitely?  Read more...

This Recession and its Lasting Socio-Economic Impacts

April 21, 2009

in Culture, Society, & Economy

trend This is the first real recession for many of us. Some are dealing with the uncertainties by crying foul and uploading blames to all the wrong sources, others are blithely unaware of the seismic shifts taking place right under our noses. Which ones of those trends are long-lasting, and which are merely temporary?

Flirting with frugality

For months, the media has been obsessive in its coverage of America’s new favourite past-time: extreme frugality. It’s one thing to have a subculture of cheapskates planning to save another ten bucks a week in some dark corner of the blogosphere (I know because I am one of those). But it’s entirely another matter to have the Wall Street Journal persuading me from buying a bottle of Evian, so I can save a buck.

With countless individuals and families dealing with foreclosure, many grappling with unemployment, and the millions suffering in silence from a vast amount of their wealth wiped out from a drop in housing prices and stock portfolios, some say that a focus on savings may not be an entirely terrible pursuit.

Certainly, if you are head over heels in debt, and threatened by lay-offs and a drastic change in income, then lifestyle changes must follow. Some consumers are so shell-shocked over the drastic drop in their perceived wealth that they may never recover to join the consumerist party again.

Indeed, America may move away from its previously rampantly materialistic culture of years past to become a more moderate consumerist group. On second thought, I’m not sure I can even believe that. The American Dream of rags to riches will not die. The passionate measures that some Americans have taken to protect and preserve their wealth (of which frugality is a tactic) can only accentuates, instead of diminishing the very American practice of linking success to material possessions. The pursuit of wealth and subsequent accumulation of wealth may be temporarily halted, but centuries of ideals and beliefs do not get erased from the collective psyche just like that.

So to foretell a future peppered with penny-pinching and miser American population is unrealistic. Those trends come in waves. A period of tightening must be followed with a period of letting lose. Once the feelings of desperation become distant memories, debt levels abate, and investment portfolios recuperate to a bearable level, Americans have little reasons to hold back.

The one exception I see in this case is a particular group of baby boomers that are neither nearing retirement, or have already retired. In their cases, massive losses of retirement savings are next to impossible to recover, leading to the next two permanent trends in both the job market and the recreational/travel industries.

Baby boomers holding the fort

If you are a baby boomer nearing retirement, but suddenly finding your nest egg much smaller than you had anticipated, and the value of your number one asset – your property, dropping more than you ever thought possible, what would you do? Instead of sailing into the sunset, you’d probably stick around for a while longer.  Read more...