oneangryslav2 at vancouvercondo.info November 20th, 2010 at 4:34 am:
“Things are not looking good in my industry [which is] dependent almost exclusively on public largesse. Moreover, a rather comprehensive sampling of friends and family would suggest that the picture is no less bleak in many other areas of the economy.”
How does the economy look from your vantage point?
What are you hearing?
I sell insurance and our office is still busy, but don’t see a lot of RE deals anymore….those days are long gone.
I don’t think the real effect / outlook with regards to the economy is clear yet.
As “liquidity” in the form of LOCs disappear so will be the spending of most people. Which in turn means less product is required and fewer people are needed to sell these products, which then in turn puts more people out of work and into debt they cannot get.
That’s the real problem we’re facing. People WITH cash will be able to get good deals on goods and services as retailers will start fighting over a smaller pie.
I think this is what many people don’t understand, as a society we’ve hung ourselves so much onto cheap credit and increasing “values” on our properties that most don’t realize just how dangerous things have become.
That’s the reason why Bernake et. al. have crashed rates and started “QE”, not because they want to get deeper into the hole but because they have no clue on how to get out of it, so the solution is a “make work” project and enlisting more people to dig the hole even deeper.
Just wait until we hit ground water and the water table starts rising.
All the signs I would have expected to see in a severe recession are not present, from what I can see, though I thought commercial office space was slow to turn over in the past few quarters.
My Dad who was employed during the recession of the early ’80s in Toronto laughs whenever he hears “recession” on the news. He said anyone who lived through the ’70s and early ’80s knows what a recession looks like, and this latest one wasn’t it.
It’s hard to get a baseline read in my industry (tech). The late ’90s were so unbelievably good — probably a once per century event — anything after that seems tepid. The vast majority of my acquaintances in the industry are employed. Some aren’t but there are, IMO, reasons for this.
“He said anyone who lived through the ’70s and early ’80s knows what a recession looks like, and this latest one wasn’t it.”
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I’d agree. We didn’t really go through a recession here, we were rescued by emergency rates before an emergency actually struck. Really perverse.
The 70′s??? Been there, done that VREAA/Jesse. I like to think of my cohort as the XGen vanguard (if you didn’t get laid in the 60′s you’re not really a ‘boomer/yuppie’)…
Trust me, 73/4/5 was brutal. As for the current state of the economy? Let’s just say it’s immeasurably worse. Here’s a public sector local example from the HillBillyRiviera:
[PentictonWesternNews] – City slashes deeper into staffing levels
http://tinyurl.com/38lz56w
The Penticton story is good, one because of how detailed it is. They list which positions are being axed. I just don’t remember seeing anything as detailed about Vancouver in the news. It also highlights that as a province BC is starting to have a tougher go than Vancouver.
It might be a bit soon to call but I could see the OK as ground zero and the poster child for what a recession looks like. Without construction it’s hard to imagine what will come to fill the void.
“Without construction it’s hard to imagine what will come to fill the void.”
+1
Okay, I know this is not really the most interesting thing, but has anyone else noticed the amount of retail stores shutting down in the mall ? Has anyone noticed that like every store has huge significant sales and promotions on, even for new merchandise, since like july ! Seriously, first I thought it was just canada sales that ran really long, then I figured maybe it was a labour day/back to school thing, but now its nearing christmas and my local mall looks like its dying ! Lougheed mall has never been great but I’ve noticed a fair amount of stores closing in the last year (mostly more recently though) and even metro town has sale signs everywhere – I feel bad for the younger inexperienced people trying to get by on retail and restraunts right now.
whatever,
I have seen the same thing. Lots of mom and pop businesses going down. Small retailers and family owned restaurants. My wife and I talk about it all the time. Every week now there is something that goes under in our area. We are near the Cambie Rise.
I was in Yaletown at a restauant the other day and it was pretty dead. Certainly compared to the past 6 months.
I don’t know anyone who is “busy” or feeling great. Everyone is either same or down.
Just the beginning.
A quick note. An acquaintance of mine mentioned a short time ago to me that he was in a store on 4th in Kits and the owner told him that this time last year he had three temporary staff to deal with all the customers. This year he has none and business is not even remotely warranting it apparently.
Sometimes vacated storefronts are businesses moving to some of the newer buildings built during the boom.
But yeah, I’ve seen a few places go down in the suburbs. What really shocked me is empty storefronts in the Korean area of North Road. This maybe a byproduct of trouble in the homeland, who knows.
I’ve also watched a few different businesses repeatedly close, rebrand, and reopen. Access to cheap credit is still keeping some zombies walking…and moaning.
Has there ever been so many For Lease signs in Vancouver? Was it like this in the 70s and 80s?
I was talking to my architect neighbour last night. He’s self-employed and is currently busy, but some of his contacts in the bigger architecture firms locally are reporting that there isn’t enough work to support all the staff. They’re worried that layoffs may be coming. I’m guessing that the volume of architectural activity is a leading indicator of future construction activity, and the health of RE generally. Local architecture firms don’t just bid on local projects, so some of the slowdown could be attributable to work drying up in the US and elsewhere. That said, I imagine a lot of the work is locally based.
yes…and less barges….leading indicator too…not much to haul!
Just returned from Seattle yesterday looking for some possible pre-Black Friday sales.
What I did notice was that the border crossing, premium outlets, traffic into downtown Seattle were all eerily quiet. The parking lot at the premium outlet were the most empty I have ever seen in my life. I have been going about 2 times a year since they opened.
Border wait times both ways were about 15 mins.
Also I work in yaletown and coworkers and I do the usual rotation of restaurants there for lunch. All very quiet compared to 2 years ago and many offering discounts to my office staff with the greatest being 20% off from Milestones.
I receive a few retail chain stores sale numbers.
90% of the stores have lower figures [this year] than 2008 YTD, when the world was going to end. Go Figure.
In my own business customers are much more picky, before the great recession I was constantly turning away work. Now many projects that I have completed in the past two years have been extremely customized client engagement everyone wants to optimize the value hey are getting.
I think all growth since 2000 has been growth caused by consumer debt I don’t have any data to back up this claim, but since this is an anecdotes blog look that huge number of pay day cash advance outfits, I recently saw ads for them on a TV. wow the cash advance places must be making a lot of money to afford TV ads or TV ads must have gotten really cheap to buy.
I think the problem in the society is that debt is so readily accepted, when I turned 18 and went to University. First day of school I went got a students loan for $10,000.00 luckily that was the only student loan I ever had to get but many of my friends got much bigger loans and graduated with $50,000.00 or more of debt. Then in the second week of school I got myself a credit card because they were handing them out for free at the university, sure it had $500.00 limit which seemed like a lot in first year but it sure got me hooked on using credit cards, luckily I had the habit of paying them off in full every month but many of my friends did not. Where debt got me was a personal line of credit that took me a few years to pay off, now I just say no to debt!
With everyone so used to debt from an early age it is now acceptable to have huge amounts of debt. We have lost our ability as a society to tell what a healthy level of debt is and we are addicted to it, we will continue to binge until we crash so badly that society regains a sense of balance regarding debt.
Don’t have money to buy a car hey no problem finance it over 5 years, hey don’t have money to go to school well just take out tens of thousands of dollars in debt … etc until we start viewing debt as the problem not the solution to everything we may be much farther along from crashing that we think we are.
There are some points that have been mentioned that I also see.
For Lease signs that have been hanging on the same store fronts for over a year and a half in some places; for lease signs in industrial parks where I work and drive by every day for the last 18 months. Can’t talk about how quiet malls are for I rarely venture into them, however, when in need of items “China Tire” does get our business. Not for the service (or shall we say lack of) but for the sales fliers. I have noticed that there is a HUGE price slashing that is going on from skimming the sales fliers. Makes me wonder who will be the first of these multi-all-in-a-box style stores that will be going into receivereship?
At work I know that we have many accounts that are past 90 days. These are from sales in the states, and in turn our bills are over 90 days in certain places. The dollars aren’t turning over as fast as they should be. Being in manufactureing this is a scary place too, for were I work it is what you can call good “middle class” wages… NOT chindia produced garbage.
Was visiting my parents house a few weeks ago. Noticed a birthday card on the table.
It was from Home Depot.