I hope everyone had a safe and happy Civic Holiday weekend! We couldn’t have asked for better weather, maybe a couple fewer bugs in Haliburton would have been ok too – but even the most beautiful home still has a lawn to mow! I, quite obviously, spend a lot of time talking to people about ‘general Real Estate stuff’ and the comments I hear all the time sometimes make my head hurt. I hear “my neighbour sold for XX and I won’t sell for less than they got” and I hear I won’t pay XX for that, they were only XX 5 years ago. What moves the market you ask, motivation! When someone saddles themselves up with often idealistic and well motivated expectations, it can make for a tough shell to crack. I have tried, oh how I have tried to explain the math and as my mother often reminds me, a lot of people don’t like having a conversation that involves math or percentages, no matter how hard one may try to make the numbers easy.
So we need to explain this out another way: has anyone noticed the high price or real vanilla extract? The last time I bought it – a few months ago, it was $38.99 for 473ml. Made me want to cry! Then I really thought about it and, knowing full well it’s extensive shelf life, and its importance to things I make all the time like whipped cream, crepes, banana bread, waffles, etc. I invested in my bakings’ flavour futures. Why had it gotten so expensive, the last bottle I was sure was under $10 and now 4 times the price? Well as it turns out the low price wasn’t making the vanilla farmers any money, so as any business person may decide to do, most of them, all decided with no communication with anyone to destroy their vanilla vines and just moved on to other more profitable crops. Couple that with nature flexing a little with a bad crop here, a little weather dominated destruction there and boom we have these prices (credit: vanillaqueen.com).
Well last year China announced to its citizens that would no longer be able to take money out of the country for foreign investment as of January 2017, this “new rule then holds people liable for what they do with that money – and could bar them from exchanging money for up to three years if they are found to have used it improperly, such as for the purchase of a home” (credit: Globe and Mail). So that was announced – there was a panic to get the money out of China before then rule became active and we have a Canadian Real Estate boom, even if they fueled the market and lose half the money they brought over, they still have the half they got here out of China so it was a win regardless. Now, it didn’t all drop by half, but that’s the easiest math to use in conversation – so your neighbour sold last year for a million and bought for one and a half million on the water in Barrie. You won’t sell because your home is only worth half a million now and he got a million, but where he bought is now only three quarters million now. So he sold and spent half a million more, you sell now and buy the place next to him and only spend a quarter million more – he sold higher and paid more, you sell lower and pay less – the difference is YOUR win! (sorry about the math I just had to) Its looking more and more like our Real Estate market has stabilized, that long list of uncertainties is becoming more of a way of life than the eerie music from behind a cellar door. Now is the start of our market making a solid move into 2019! We are here to make that as easy as possible for you and your family and friends mccarthomes.com.