I apologize for the lack of postings this summer. Between the amount of business we’ve been doing (what recession?) and my trip to California in August, I’ve had difficulty keeping the blog up to date.
The Iman conference in San Francisco I attended last week was the best conference I’ve ever been to. Representing CREA’s MTC committee (which I sit on), Inman focuses on technology and real estate. Social media was the topic of many of the seminars, and I learned that we in real estate only use it to a n’th of its potentials.
Despite being aware of how bad the economy is in the U.S., I was surprised as to how deep and widespread the recession is and how depressed real estate markets are across the country.
Returning from a morning of whale watching on Monterey Bay (we saw several humpbanks and blues) I had an interesting chat with a woman and her husband from Reno, Nevada. The gentleman is a home builder and she’s a real estate broker with over 20 years experience and owns a small boutique office in the city. After exchanging typical real estate niceties like “hows the market”, she told me how she’s only had a single sale since last March (of 2008) and that she had to lay off her entire staff, close her office and run what’s left of the brokerage out of her home. They’re currently living off what’s left of the equity in their home and their retirement nest egg. She’s seeing a slow turnaround in the market, helped mostly by the stimulus package the Obama government introduced earlier in the year.
Yesterday, Kim and I took a walked through downtown Sonoma, California, which is in the heart of wine country, with some of the most expensive real estate in the country. When Kim slipped into one of the clothing stores on the street, I walked into a Coldwell Banker office next door and struck up a conversation with the duty agent.
Instead of my usual “how’s the market”, I asked, “how bad are things here?” She responded with a bit of smile on her face, that things were slowly improving and that prices were down 25% from the peak in 2007.
When I asked about the amount of activity in the market, she replied that there were 35 homes that sold last month, which was up from the previous few months.
That’s 35 home sales in a trading area of about 30,000 people…about the same size of Orillia.
Ouch!
While we’ve sometimes complained about how bad things the economy is in Canada, we’ve got nothing on our neighbours to our south. You see the effects of the recession everywhere you look, from the numbers of homeless people on the streets of San Francisco, to the numerous ads on radio and TV promoting the government’s Cash for Clunkers program.
Economic recovery is taking hold in the U.S., but it is going to take a long time to fully take hold. We, in Canada, should be thankful of our conservative banking and lending practices, amongst other things, that have helped use get through the recession relatively quickly and with less pain than most countries in the industrialized world.
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