“Last week I had a conversation with one of my co-workers, who recently got engaged, about her RE plans. Her fiance and her have fairly good paying jobs and are currently renting. She is a SFU grad and her fiance is a recent UBC grad. She told me she desperately wants to have a place of her own and is thinking about diving into the market. I advised her to wait at least a year and see what happens in spring of 2013 before taking the plunge. She then gave me a confused look and stated: “But aren’t prices still going up in the lower mainland, I mean look at all those sold out presales in the news recently.”After hearing that I knew she has not done any research at all. I then told her to check out this blog [VCI], Garth’s blog, and a few other RE blogs before she makes her final decision. I was literally shocked by her lack of knowledge of current conditions. In the last few months even the MSM has been reporting on the emergence of a “buyers market”. But for some reason she has filtered all those bearish reports and concentrated on the sensational stories of presale sell outs with people lining up just to get a chance to snap up a few units. Sometimes I just don’t get it. People are making financial decisions that will effect them for the next 25 years in some cases even more, and they base their decisions largely by their emotions sometimes irrational and the message being spewed by the highly biased MSM. In my opinion RE blogs are providing a great service to the general public by providing a different perspective of the RE debate and hopefully they can save a few sheeple from becoming the greatest fools of all.”
– Waiting to exhale at VCI December 8th, 2012 at 7:40 pm
The average Vancouver RE market participant continues to view the market as robust.
We expect this to change profoundly in 2013-2014, as price weakness becomes obvious.
– vreaa
Vancouver Real Estate Anecdote Archive 
Many if not most people are influenced by the MSM and have no idea about blogs. If the MSM spent as much time covering the down times as they did the up, the market would be cooler than it is.
Isn’t this woman the blog’s ideal? Buys real estate, affordably, for personal consumption when life stage dictates. Now it’s her fault that she doesn’t know we’re in the endgame of a speculative mania? It’s like asking a fish about water.
I think intelligent and informed people tend to overestimate the intelligence and informed-ness of those around them. A lot more people than you think probably couldn’t even name the prime minister. A lot of people don’t watch the news, never mind read papers or for enlightenment. It’s all cat videos all the time.
Absolutely agree. The vast majority of the herd out there are clueless morons who would sooner have an original thought out side the norm as they would stand on a street corner in a nazi uniform shouting sieg heil
The ability to name the prime minister is a sign of intelligence? 🙂
I would rather ask about prime numbers…
Recently engaged? No rational or economic argument in the universe can go up against the biological force of a nesting woman.
After referring friends to these blogs，they call these sites doomers.
I agree. Next year, they will call them prescient. Very few “ordinary people” saw and described the bubble in the US before it collapsed. They went from “stupid renters” to “clever visionaries”.
If the media spent as much time on dog bites man stories as they do on man bites dog stories.. Society would be a far more functional place
Ikea monkey’s owner is a real estate lawyer
It will be time to buy when cab drivers cry after you bring up real estate.
“I then told her to check out this blog [VCI], Garth’s blog, and a few other RE blogs”
AWFUL advice. Those two sites are the biggest broken clocks on the internet and full of amateur economists with just enough knowledge to be dangerous but not enough to be useful.
Echo chambers of pessimism and bearishness. I can understand why a layperson would be completely repulsed by the bear side after seeing those sites.
Especially since they’ve been dead wrong going on 7 years. Call a downturn in real estate and you’ll eventually be right, because it’s a cyclical market, but that doesn’t mean you know anything. 7 god damn years of being wrong. Sad.
“amateur economists with just enough knowledge to be dangerous but not enough to be useful”
Funny, that’s exactly how I feel about BCREA.
“Funny, that’s exactly how I feel about BCREA.”
Are you suggesting that it’s either BCREA or VCI and greaterfool? Because that is a false dichotomy.
Anyone would be a fool to trust BCREA’s opinions. Obviously they are going to spin things to suit their agenda.
In real terms these blogs have been right about many parts and classes of Vancouver-area properties for six years and counting. True story.
Yeah. I liked their recent piece calling the US housing market a “bubble”, despite their being plenty of cash flow positive properties available south of the border.
And wasn’t that the denizens of VCI favourite metric from 2005? That renting is cheaper than buying? Well that situation is reversed in the USA but that seems to fly over everyone’s head and they call it a bubble instead of seeing an opportunity.
VCI is a place where pessimism and bearishness are more important than making money. They’ll probably call the bottom the start of the next bubble and miss it – AGAIN. And anyone who says otherwise will have their post voted into foreclosure. End rant.
I think I agree with you. Some people will react to those sites, but they have to be open minded, willing to do a lot of work researching leads that commenters occasionally leave pointers to, and willing to sift through a lot of chaff.
But where to point people? I can’t think of a Real Estate Bubbles for Idiots site.
I don’t think these bear sites are calling for a downturn in real estate, I think they’re calling for an epic crash. They’ve been saying that this can’t go on forever, and it isn’t like the bulls were saying “real estate will continue to go up because the government will introduce 40 year zero down money and keep real interest rates at zero for as long as it takes.” All I’ve been hearing from the bull camp is “market timers get crushed” and “you can’t tell a bubble until after it pops.”
Maybe the problem is cultural. Because my friends and family don’t have problems talking about the real estate market, money, and information comming through the grape vine. Maybe such frank conversion are not possible with some cultural groups. I don’t know, it’s just a guess.
If someone wanted to learn more I would point them here http://realestatetalks.com/viewforum.php?f=8
At least people regularly post sale prices of properties, compare then to the assessed price and what similar properties sold for 12-18 months in the past. That’s the kind of information any diligent buyer can understand.
Oh it’s bull! Bull! Bull!
Ad-hominem fallacy, aka “bear logic”.
i’ll have a ‘frank conversion’ with you, mr. bored realtor – fuck off if you don’t like that discussions here.
my engrish is devolving
A simple case of seeing what you want to see. Look at it this way: someone has to take it for the team.
Are there blogs about the current and historical prices of clock radios? Are there news articles that tell people about the best times to make offers on clock radios? Do people horde them to contribute to their net worth? Why is this blog about real estate markets and not the clock radio market?
Because it’s a real estate blog.
Because never in history have a large fraction of the population gone all in on clock radios they couldn’t really afford, fuelled by easy credit, and then had to live through a gruesome clock radio bust which dragged the economy down with it for a few years? I’m not saying it couldn’t happen…
Because they won’t stop making more of the dam things.
I imagine most people put about 5% of their income towards housing much the same way with their groceries bills, The housing market isn’t much more exciiting than the grocery market but it constantly is in the news. I imagine that the average man walking down a vancouver street owns at least 3 franchised bussinesses and earns over $250,000 a year. A few thousand dollars off his networth is hardly remarkable enough to place so much attention on.
Wow! We got a comment from outer space! This blog is taking off!
There are a lot of Realtors out there with ‘time on their hands’, CT…
lilty not purebred prevert … http://tinyurl.com/d6zcrg … btw, don’t go near the wsd
http://bit.ly/UCHSI4
I once bought a car that on credit that I couldn’t afford. It wasn’t a big deal. I cant imagine there’s blogs about men and women that buy cars on credit and then default on it, because who really cares if John Doe can’t make his car payments. If worst comes to worst he’ll walk more and take the bus. Every problem must have a solution.
How much does a German Link Farmer get paid these days, anyway?
Lilly,
If you buy the car on credit, is it insured by the taxpayer. Hint CMHC.
You just gave me an idea…
If you can’t afford something it wont really matter, you’ll just either get annoying letters in the mail asking you to pay or if its serious you can get a bancruptcy and then after 9 months your credit can start improving again.
If the price dropped it would probably be good for the economy because people at or near minimum wage would be able to afford a family home. Then more people’d be looking for work and the economy would have higher employment and then wages would go up and assets would appreciate the same again. I don’t see the grusomeness in this scenario.
Imagine I’m a hindu that owns a pizza shop. In one scneario I’m extremly lucky and I found two excellent workers that will do a great job for $10.25 an hour. I can then myself manage more and work less, and I can serve more customers at busy periods. If this happens then maybe I can own 3 houses with my income. But if my two excellent workers want to also own property and cant forsee working for me as part of that plan then maybe they’ll sit at home and I’ll be working 14 hour days by myself running it. I’m now working more and managing less and my capacity to serve people is lower. I can now maybe earn enough to buy two houses. If I pay people enough to come back maybe I can own 2 houses still, because I’m selling more but paying more wages that offset my profits. Now the 2 have enough earnings to qualify for their houses and more equity is created than if they’d stayed home cursing employers for paying too little. But this isn’t very likely because I own it and I want the lions share of its profits. So maybe I try finding louts to work for little money and I’ll try getting 3 houses while enduring higher turnover. But the best scenario I see is if the markets drops and then I can hire the bastards at minimum wage and they too will qualify for mortgages and I get my 3 houses still and they get to create equity along with me. Therefore most people all benefit if the market drops out and becomes affordable to begin driving prices higher once again.
We hav angered the bored realtors! Mission accomplished!
PS – loyal cadre, you’re a racist
Post of the year
It is post of the year in a bad way.
Like the Rasberry Awards for the movies.
mr robinson?
Your logic is impeccable!
LOL WUT
http://hellothereracists.tumblr.com/
My god. Did I actually just read that? Weren’t the 4 posts of his above a good enough hint? Damn you for saying Post of the Year.
LOL
It seems more and more bulls are starting to pop up in the comments. An interesting trend.
It’s true that the Bear Blogs are broken clocks with respect to timing the market. They express a lot of wishful thinking, their judgment is clearly clouded by emotion and frustration, and they incorrectly call cataclysmic market crashes nearly as often as a Used House Salesman says “Right now is the best time to buy!(tm)”
If you’re reading the Bear Blogs for market timing advice, YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.
Instead, treat the Bear Blogs as a Salon or coffee house where opinions that outrageously contradict “common knowledge” can be expressed freely. It’s just a place to exchange ideas about alternative interpretations, alternative data sets, and alternative strategies.
After all, if the only source of knowledge, information, interpretation, and opinion in our society was the MSM (and those who parrot it because they believe it makes them sound informed and sophisticated,) we would live in a horrible and manipulated world. We would all believe that real estate always goes up, that Saddam had WMDs, the sun orbits the earth, race x or country y is evil and must be fought, and that the best thing to do about climate change is to cripple the world’s economies by implementing impossible restrictions on basically everything — that nobody even thinks will stop climate change anyway.
Imagine that!
We NEED sober second thought; we need the dissenters and the questioners and the “this just doesn’t feel right” people, and we need to give them time at the microphone. Even if they’re wrong about the details, they help everyone to question their own beliefs.
The most destructive force in the history of the world is faith.
wow. the desperation of denial. They’d hire professional trolls but the sales are too low and there is no money to pay.