“Sellers will commonly say, 'I’m going to wait until the spring, when the market is better.' And I warn them that it could be worse. And buyers are saying 'It looks like things are bad, I’m going to hold off until the market drops another 10 or 20%.”

“While the national housing market appears to be retreating in an orderly way, the data show pockets of sharper slowdown, particularly in the western Canadian cities of Vancouver and Victoria, which once led the hot housing market.
“Personally I don’t see any revitalization of the market in the near future,” said Victoria real estate agent Tony Joe, noting that investors have left the market.
Residential sales fell 8.3% in September from a year earlier in Victoria and were down 32.5% in Vancouver, according to the local real estate boards. Prices were down 2.6% in Victoria and 1.4% in Vancouver on the year, according to the Teranet report.
The price declines are far smaller than the plunge that hit U.S. homeowners during the crash. Still, buyers are hesitant, wondering if they should wait until next year to purchase.
“Sellers will commonly say, ‘I’m going to wait until the spring, when the market is better.’ And I warn them that it could be worse,” said Joe. “And of course buyers are saying ’It looks like things are bad, I’m going to hold off until the market drops another 10 or 20%.”’
Joe, a 21-year industry veteran, does not foresee such a drastic decline, simply because Canadian lenders have been prudent and interest rates are not going up soon. Sellers will pull houses off the market rather than accept a price drop.”
- from ‘Canada braces as housing slowdown takes hold’, National Post, 5 Nov 2012