The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (US) created something known as Opportunity Zones. These are low-income and high-poverty census tracts that are designed to attract investment by offering a number of different tax benefits. I first wrote about it on the blog, here.… Read More
Last Thursday the Supreme Court of Canada announced it would not hear an appeal from the Toronto Real Estate Board regarding a 2016 Competition Bureau decision aimed at giving consumers greater online access to information, such as historical (home) sale prices. I am not at… Read More
Aaron Terrazas, who is a Senior Economist at Zillow, recently gave this presentation about the US and Virginia Beach housing markets. (I discovered it through City Observatory.) There are a bunch of interesting graphs/stats in the presentation. Home values in Virginia Beach, for example, have… Read More
The New York Times recently published “a portrait of new single-family homes” in the US in 2016. Here’s that portrait: For those of those living in dense urban centers, this portrait is perhaps a reminder that in many other places a large single-family home can… Read More
Below is a piece by Michael Salter from the Globe and Mail. It’s all about Toronto’s HOT, HOT housing market. Michael’s message: Here are the real reasons why home prices are skyrocketing and why they are going to remain high. Did you find yourself agreeing with this… Read More
This morning, I am looking at the following chart of average home prices in the Greater Toronto Area: It’s from this Globe and Mail article. These are staggering numbers. The average price of a detached home in the suburbs (905 area code) increased 21% year-over-year.… Read More
When it comes to a real estate market, there are always the typical metrics: sale prices, rents, vacancy and so on. But I’m always interested when somebody looks at the market in a different way and comes up with other kinds of metrics. That’s why… Read More
Seeing how we’ve started looking at data from last year, I thought it would be interesting to look at global home prices as of Q4 2015. Here’s a chart from Knight Frank, which they refer to as their Global House Price Index: At the top… Read More
Zillow.com recently published some research where they looked at U.S. home prices broken down according to location: urban, suburban, and rural. Here’s what they found: As you can see, urban homes across the U.S. largely trailed their suburban counterparts in terms of absolute value up… Read More
Bing Thom Architects recently published a blog post looking at the property values of single family homes in Vancouver. The data was taken from the City of Vancouver Open Data Catalogue and is based on British Columbia Assessment data. The precise timing of the data… Read More
