Rachelle Younglai’s recent piece in the Globe and Mail does a great job summarizing Canada’s COVID-19 housing boom. The title of the article is, “How Canada’s real estate market defied expectations in the COVID-19 pandemic.” Non-mortgage debt is down. Mortgage debt is up. Money is… Read More
The story of two markets continues. Median rents in San Francisco are down some 27% percent over the last year. Sales of homes priced under $300,000 are down by about a fifth. And yet, according to the Financial Times, sales are up significantly for homes… Read More
The Toronto Regional Real Estate Board released its 2020 housing figures this week. And I suspect that the numbers are probably directionally similar for many city regions around the world. 2020 saw more home sales than 2019 with 95,151 homes changing hands. This represents an… Read More
The Globe and Mail published this headline today: “Developers building more small condos, despite people clamoring for more space.” It’s behind a paywall and so some of you may not have read it. But the data looks something like this. Of all the new condo… Read More
Here is an interesting article from the Financial Times talking about the quiet move of people and companies from Hong Kong to Singapore. I say quiet, because apparently Hong Kong-based companies are reluctant to overtly signal that they are setting up offices and moving some… Read More
Last week was the Vancouver Real Estate Forum. Benjamin Tal (chief economist at CIBC) opened things up, as he usually does, and he was pretty candid about what might be coming this winter. Here is an excerpt from a recent Globe and Mail article summarizing… Read More
This recent WSJ article, which is largely about single-family home landlords in the United States, has some interesting charts about mortgaged homes. The following chart shows the percentage of US homes that are worth less than their debt (i.e. they’re underwater). Following the financial crisis,… Read More
It has been well documented that Tokyo tends to build a lot of housing. And the argument goes that this has helped to maintain a certain level of housing affordability. The city is constantly building and rebuilding. It also has different views about housing. Now,… Read More
The Wall Street Journal reported today that the median home price across the United States rose 8% year-over-year in March to $280,600. One explanation for this is that while, yes, demand did drop off, so too did supply and that has led to a shortage… Read More
This recent paper by Miyuki Hino (University of North Carolina) and Marshall Burke (Stanford) makes the case that US homes situated within floodplains are currently overvalued by a total of $34 billion. And that’s because the associated risks are not being properly accounted for in… Read More
