The sad thing is that if your budget is $450k an below you are not only in a bidding war scenario, but you WILL end up massively overpaying for what you get. Yes its driven by demand so the price is reflected by that but just on absolute face value of price paid versus amount of house received for that it very expensive. Compared to what you can buy for $555k and up. Its "only" about a $100k difference but it buys you a lot more house.
400,000 and under buys a shed today. I remember being in Victoria, BC in 2009 looking for homes, and 400,000 bought basically a shed. I was worried I would be buying at the top of the market and spend the next 30 years paying off a 400,000 mortgage on a 200,000 home. Today it's only worse, 400,000 buys you the front door of a shed in Victoria. If you want something that looks more like a home and less like a trailer, you're spending 1.2 mil. If Halifax today is where Victoria was in 2009, its going to just get worse for young people. I hope the government doesn't NIMBY young people into poverty. If supply keeps up with demand, maybe home prices will level off. But we'd need a lot more home starts. Yes it looks like a lot of homes are being built, but it is not keeping up with population growth. edit: Just some numbers.. NS has been building between 5000 - 7000 housing units per year and adding about 20,000 people per year. Most people are single today (meaning they will each require one unit of housing), married with children is a minority moving into the province. If more people got married, we'd solve housing tomorrow. But that is unlikely to happen.
All good / interesting points! For the housing units being built, I look at completions, not starts (starts are great, but completions are what will move the needle). So yes, it should rise. But the last data from stats canada was 5,174 completions in NS in 2022 (annoying how much this data lags behind). That was the most completions since 2003. Housing Starts are way up, so hopefully completions will rise as well.. Projects have been slow with limited labour, etc.
The problem is wages HAVE NOT increased while home prices have. We have 4.9 million temporary residents who need to leave to allow wages to increase. This is the problem and the solution.
That is only half of the truth. The other half of the truth is that Canada has for a long while needed immigration to boost the economy. On the one side to fight stagnation in population internally due to low birth rate, but also and I think more importantly because they know it boosts the economy to have immigrants come here and spend their life savings to get settled, get education at exorbitant prices etc. Also many of these foreign students and immigrants are wealthy or bring with them generational savings to spend here. Those that are not that wealthy still bring all their savings to resettle and will pay whatever the market requires to resettle. It's often only enough to survive short term for many of them, till things get tight but by then you have already moved halfway across the world. So then we just require more immigrants to keep boosting so it's just a rinse and repeat. It really is a huge part of the economy and if you don't keep up with infrastructure we see the problems we see now with healthcare, housing and such. I am sure it was a good policy that benefited the country as a whole in the past, but from my opinion, as a immigrant 5 years ago, these days it borders close to being a Ponzi scheme aka to keep things going we just have to keep getting in new immigrants to spend their money here and as an added bonus get some cheap labour (which has a knock on effect of keeping wages low on average for everyone)
Are you concerned with the direction that Nova Scotia Real Estate is headed?
I really appreciate the statistics that you had. Thank you.
Thanks for watching!
Really enjoyed this episode!
Thanks for watching!
The sad thing is that if your budget is $450k an below you are not only in a bidding war scenario, but you WILL end up massively overpaying for what you get. Yes its driven by demand so the price is reflected by that but just on absolute face value of price paid versus amount of house received for that it very expensive. Compared to what you can buy for $555k and up. Its "only" about a $100k difference but it buys you a lot more house.
🙌
400,000 and under buys a shed today. I remember being in Victoria, BC in 2009 looking for homes, and 400,000 bought basically a shed. I was worried I would be buying at the top of the market and spend the next 30 years paying off a 400,000 mortgage on a 200,000 home. Today it's only worse, 400,000 buys you the front door of a shed in Victoria. If you want something that looks more like a home and less like a trailer, you're spending 1.2 mil.
If Halifax today is where Victoria was in 2009, its going to just get worse for young people. I hope the government doesn't NIMBY young people into poverty. If supply keeps up with demand, maybe home prices will level off. But we'd need a lot more home starts. Yes it looks like a lot of homes are being built, but it is not keeping up with population growth.
edit: Just some numbers.. NS has been building between 5000 - 7000 housing units per year and adding about 20,000 people per year. Most people are single today (meaning they will each require one unit of housing), married with children is a minority moving into the province.
If more people got married, we'd solve housing tomorrow. But that is unlikely to happen.
All good / interesting points! For the housing units being built, I look at completions, not starts (starts are great, but completions are what will move the needle). So yes, it should rise. But the last data from stats canada was 5,174 completions in NS in 2022 (annoying how much this data lags behind). That was the most completions since 2003. Housing Starts are way up, so hopefully completions will rise as well.. Projects have been slow with limited labour, etc.
The problem is wages HAVE NOT increased while home prices have.
We have 4.9 million temporary residents who need to leave to allow wages to increase.
This is the problem and the solution.
That is only half of the truth. The other half of the truth is that Canada has for a long while needed immigration to boost the economy. On the one side to fight stagnation in population internally due to low birth rate, but also and I think more importantly because they know it boosts the economy to have immigrants come here and spend their life savings to get settled, get education at exorbitant prices etc. Also many of these foreign students and immigrants are wealthy or bring with them generational savings to spend here. Those that are not that wealthy still bring all their savings to resettle and will pay whatever the market requires to resettle. It's often only enough to survive short term for many of them, till things get tight but by then you have already moved halfway across the world. So then we just require more immigrants to keep boosting so it's just a rinse and repeat. It really is a huge part of the economy and if you don't keep up with infrastructure we see the problems we see now with healthcare, housing and such. I am sure it was a good policy that benefited the country as a whole in the past, but from my opinion, as a immigrant 5 years ago, these days it borders close to being a Ponzi scheme aka to keep things going we just have to keep getting in new immigrants to spend their money here and as an added bonus get some cheap labour (which has a knock on effect of keeping wages low on average for everyone)