“We went to a Chinese restaurant near Main St. and who was booming real estate advice to a middle-aged woman but this crazy realtor. He showed her how, using his hand like an airplane, the real estate market would go down by 5%. Then, plane angling up, it would go back up again and that at the end of 10 years it would not lose any money. (Why again are stock brokers forbidden from making similar comments on the market but RE agents aren’t?)
He then tried to sell her on a condo downtown telling her there were good deals there as prices were down (dunno… maybe part of the predicted 5% dip). Then, she said something, we couldn’t hear, and next thing you know he said condos would go nowhere for the foreseeable future and they weren’t a good deal, a way to lose money. The best deal now was a house with a yard. Eventually I had to drown him out by putting my chopsticks in my ears. I don’t know how I managed to digest dinner.”
– mac at VCI 23 May 2012 10:12pm
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Realtors are salespeople, and are unwise to be making predictions about market direction.
What if clients took them to task on these predictions later?
– vreaa
Vancouver Real Estate Anecdote Archive 
I knew a guy who could illustrate the bond market yield curve steepening, flattening and inverting with his eyebrows. Those two would make quite the sales team together.
Funny thing about aerial demonstrations… they often ‘play’ better in WonTon houses than they do at Le Bourget…
NoteToEd: A few weeks later, Anatoliy Kvochur’s next Mig29UB performed rather better at Abbotsford…
“…he said condos would go nowhere for the foreseeable future and they weren’t a good deal, a way to lose money. The best deal now was a house with a yard”.
Bingo!
So you think all the condo owners with negative equity will not affect the rest of the market?
Over a long enough term, urban land will at least keep up with inflation, and likely better, barring a Fukushima-type incident. But a condo with a 1/250th interest in 10,000 sqft of land will, I think, eventually depreciate to a number not far from zero.
Still, condo owners who’d planned on moving up but for whom markets moved in a direction not necessarily to their advantage? That’s reduced demand for SFH, definitely.
Realtors can make predictions just like any stockbroker/analyst can. They only get in trouble if they guarantee performance and that performance does not match. I believe Ozzie Jurock got into trouble with some investors on that one a couple of years ago on some stink pile of shoddy construction in Northern BC.
Part of a professional stockbroker’s job is to analyse and offer opinions about the state of the markets, to offer investment advice; clients pay brokers with that in mind. This is why some people still use full service brokerages rather than manage their own portfolios via (the far cheaper) online option.
Realtors are not trained to analyze market conditions nor to predict market direction – yet they often offer opinions in this regard. We are suggesting that they would be wise to either not offer such opinions or, if they must, to do so only with unequivocally clear disclaimers.
If the market tanks as we anticipate, we think here will be more than a handful of owners angry at their realtors for being reassured that Vancouver RE was pretty much bullet proof.
My cousin who is a senior managing director at Cyrus Capital Partners and formerly at Goldman Sachs told me 20% drop in Vancouver soon.
Back in 06-07 he told me about the US bubble and how things are gonna get alot worse. Anyone who looks at the numbers already know, they just can’t/won’t say anything publicly.
Hope this is not OT, or someone has not already posted this, but Gord Goble has published an op-ed on the housing bubble in a Burnaby newspaper. Have been trying to forward the link and have not been able to, but it is available over at VCI in today’s comments there.
I can’t paste the desktop version, here’s the mobile edition.
http://m.burnabynow.com/svc/wlws.svc/getHtml#article/?sectionId=623&feedId=1134&articleId=4486571
if you’re OT, what am i? 🙂 … here it is … http://tinyurl.com/6portlz
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here’s OT … local bc boy might get a chance to stand on top step come sunday … http://tinyurl.com/cuk8wc4
and for those with a taste for italian screaming … (not the castrato_stuff) … http://tinyurl.com/csgl6jg
Italiani urlando? Prova questo, MonkeyBoy …
freedom aesthetic, yay! … find italians scream freedom? … not quite, but youtube is a strange place … not unlike bumming through other peoples’ trash … possible to find much optimism about humans … check out guy on left! … http://tinyurl.com/6ulaoed
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also, missing out if not reading borowitz …
http://www.borowitzreport.com/2012/05/17/a-letter-from-mark-zuckerberg/
Hehe. It doesn’t say much we don’t already know, but it says it in the MSM. The version published in today’s Coquitlam Now is bigger, better, edgier, and pretty much verbatim. If you wanna read it, go to the Coquitlam Now site, click on Digital Edition, and head for Page 9.
Good article, Gord.
Great to get the word out, well done.
Will headline Coquitlam version in all its glorious entirety.
PREDATORY REAL ESTATE AGENTS. DRIVEN BY GREED!!!
http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Another+class+action+certified+against+local+real+estate+promoter/6526472/story.html