HawthorneVillager.com

I meant 500,000 for a couple. It was more a ball park figure, and I should have stressed minimum. Assuming a 5% return on that money, that’s $25,000 a year income. CPP and other benefits will top that off, and you have a meager existence. If you own a descent sized home, you can downsize, or move to thunder bay, etc. Like I said, minimum.

1 million is what most people should shoot for. Like I said, 500,000K won’t be achieved by most.

..and another spin..



http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-o ... le1831359/

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your past the point of annoying with your doom and gloom buddy, give it a rest! prices are still up and rising. the prince of cut and paste.

your the self appointed expert. see Cliff Barons latest listing. ask $799 and sold $785, yes in Milton professor gloom.

$785? A new high for Milton in the slow cold month of December? Certainly the end of the world, we are skipping 2 years to 2012, yes I am certain as the day is long the world will end soon if that price is true.

You make some decent points from time to time, but you can't keep saying that "less and less people are willing to buy at these prices".
If that was the case, we'd see a lot more canceled and expired listings, along with significant price drops, which we aren't seeing either of here in Milton. We are merely seeing fewer listings - less speculators, less profit taking than in '09. Is that necessarily a bad thing?

Just by looking at the one stat you seem to be concentrating on, "volume", you could in theory say less and less people are wanting to sell.

There could be MANY reasons why sales are lower month to month from April to Nov in Milton... any or all of:

1) The huge spike in Jan/Feb/Mar - Year of Year we're only down a total of 5% in volume

2) Fewer new builder closings than in Summer/Fall 2009, when mattamy closed Hundreds of homes in south HVE alone in fall of '09 and many were investors that turned around and sold to take huge gains, bumping up the number.

3) More new builder competition, with new releases at Mattamy and lineups longer than ever, in fall 2010 - show us the numbers for new home sales in Milton too, showing availability and sell-out times as well, including variable factors such as changes in development charges and the HST.

4) The higher numbers last year and early 2010 might simply mean less people want to move AGAIN - they are happy with their homes, made their moves, and who knows, looking at 5 - 10 yr trending, we could be right on track. You'd have to show us that too.

If you put together a case with all these stats, then you might have more of a leg to stand on.

IMHO, stick to your 'debt is too high' angle, which is easier to agree with, and forget about the sales volumes for now if you want to keep a more credible point afloat.
Thoughts?

I think we are getting closer to the answer to the question of the original post!

Hold on a minute rph, are you telling me Brampton had been releasing stats all the while and it was just not published on the website ol skool had been watching earnestly because of some lazy ass webmaster or something?

You are trying to tell me it had not all been a huge conspiracy to hide the fact that you can now buy homes at 10% of the value it was last year because the Brampton real estate had crashed so bad they were holding off publishing the data?

Shooot!

I'm actually curious so I'll look into it on Monday. I don't do Brampton (I know Milton, Burlington, Oakville, Mississauga, most of 416, and most of York Region).

I don't work in Brampton at all, so I don't keep up on the stats there. I'll add this to my to-do list for tomorrow afternoon. I have my theories as well, but I will gladly pull stats and let you know what I think about what I find.

Last point for tonight - I know we're not immune, but being the fastest growing town, we'll have no Walkerton or Three Mile Island property value crisis going on here, at least until other areas are hit. By being in a high demand place with moderate home prices compared to the surrounding areas, we'll be in better shape than our closest neighbours to the east and south, that's for sure. (That's Oakville and Mississauga, NOT the US and UK lol)

average in toronto is a bungalow, the house that sold here for 785k would sell in toronto for 1.9mil, get your facts straight old skool, you misconstrue and massage the stats and figures to suite your agenda.

Where did you get those numbers from?
The CIA factbook shows US at #11 in world, Canada at #26

PLus tack on the fact our minimum wage is much higher than the US, we have more government assistance for low income, and Milton in general is well above the Canadian average income and I can not fathom a 1 year 10% drop in housing prices ever happening (our house prices are actually lower than many areas in the GTA)

You need to watch averages when comparing Canadian and US home prices.

Canada has a huge proportion of its population living in or around Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, or Montreal. Almost all of our growth revolves around these centers because everywhere else is either too small to attract immigrants, or frozen wasteland. Our averages are skewed towards big-city markets.

The US is enormous, with dozens and dozens of cities, and most of its land in habitable areas, and plenty of land available for growth. You also have 10% of the population living in trailers or slightly nicer “manufactured homes”. It keeps their averages skewed towards small-city markets.

If you want to compare Canada to the US, you need to compare similar markets, not national averages.

With that said, Milton is still a small town on the outskirts of the city, and paying $800,000 for a house with no land is absolutely obscene. I’m sorry, but you just don’t pay that this far out in the burbs. We’re either in for a correction, or many many years of stagnation.

It's not about doom and gloom....more of a winter storm warning.
Better to be prepared and not have the storm hit then be lost in the blizzard when it does.

More stories are now emerging of Canadian debt overload.
When Mark Carney and the big Canadian bank CEO's are sending warnings then we should listen.

How many 5/35ers can afford 25yr amortization at time of renewal in a few years if mortgage rules tighten again?

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-o ... le1833774/

Excerpt:
"The history books are rich with examples of countries whose citizens believed they were immune to financial bubbles, or who thought their banks were impregnable, and who felt that nothing bad could ever happen to them. It’s overconfidence that leads to too much borrowing, and Americans have no monopoly on that. The best book on the subject is This Time is Different, by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff (of the University of Maryland and Harvard, respectively), who document centuries of debt crises. Most instructive is their chapter on banking disasters, which, the authors write, tend to happen this way (I’m simplifying here): A country finds itself very popular with international investors and sees a surge of foreign capital. (Check.) Housing prices rise at a rate much faster than the rate of inflation for a sustained period of time. People argue that the old rules of valuation no longer apply. (Check.) Eventually, real estate values start to fall. Banks show signs of stress, usually soon after home prices hit their peak. As defaults rise, the banks are shorn of capital and pull back on their lending, causing a downturn. (Not yet.) The evidence, say Ms. Reinhart and Mr. Rogoff, is that “when housing booms are accompanied by sharp rises in debt, the risk of a crisis is significantly elevated” (emphasis added).And, as Americans and Irish and Swedes and Spanish have discovered, recessions that spring from banking crises tend to be deep, protracted, and expensive. They drive up government debt quickly.

Not all credit booms end in crisis, and Canada’s might not, either. But the longer consumers ignore Mr. Carney’s alarm bells on debt, the harder it will be for policy makers to engineer a soft landing for the real estate market. And if it’s a hard landing? That would end the complacency in a hurry."

Not the first time I've been accused of being a cut and paste junkie.

Ok...I'll listen to the bank CEO's. They have their, I mean our money all stashed for a rainy day.
Hopefully people will manage to keep some for themselves and reduce their household debt.

Who am I kidding?
This whole debt overload thing is just a figment of my imagination.

11th & 26th in income worldwide
The link was provided (or google CIA factbook)

Yet you claim that our gap was much smaller ($3000 difference)

Minimum is something like $12 in ON now btw