601–610 of 817 posts
I grew up in Waterloo. The home my parents bought in 1989 went up by about 2000% since then. I make more than both combined then, inflation adjusted, and can’t afford that home.
I bought a home down the road in a small blue collar city for 525k. It took 24 months for it to _double_ in value.
I hate this. It needs to stop. The bubble need to be popped.
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I never said it was an "elaborate scheme orchestrated by all the homeowners." It is a natural result of people independently acting purely based on their personal incentives. Homeowners don't need to orchestrate and elaborate scheme, they just vote for the politicians who will prioritize increasing home values because that will help them financially. That politician will enact policies favorable to homeowners because…
> Homeowners don't need to orchestrate and elaborate scheme, they just vote for the politicians who will prioritize increasing home values because that will help them financially. Or y'know...maybe homeowners don't want to have their neighborhood become overcrowded. Not everyone wants to live in a megacity with traffic, air pollution, constant bustle, and restricted personal liberty. If financial gain is your only mo…
Then it’s time to collect your scarcity-generated windfall and move someplace rural you’ll like better! Super-common, and you can even complain self-righteously about the terribly governed crime-ridden hellhole you’re leaving behind.
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Well, it's not the immigrants' fault - it's the government's fault. At the end of the day, this confluence of circumstances is its responsibility. The combination of low interest rates, no expansive public transport projects, no action on money-laundering, hurdles in supply (as you mentioned) - and yes, expansive immigration policies (Canada had the highest population growth in the G7, mostly due to immigration [0]).…
Here where I live, the people who show up at hearings to stop homes from being built are all wealthy-ish local people. Not immigrants, not some faceless government, not BlackRock, but our neighbors.
The government may be faceless, but there are lots of things that could have been done - including more "development-friendly" practices. However, there's always a cost - do you sacrifice environmental protections? Democratic government principles?
You can't just blame whatever out-group you dislike at the moment. If those neighbors you described vanished as of 5 years ago, the prices of houses would have risen just the same.
The reason that I blame government is because they explicitly had a responsibility to protect society from this. Officials have either neglected or outright contravened this responsibility.
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All this is true and bad but the Canadian market is primarily driven by supply issues, not red tape. There just aren’t enough houses/condos. The resulting price boom isn’t a mere 5-10% increase, but hundreds of percent over the course of only 5-10 years. I’ve seen condo prices double three times in five years in places.
> All this is true and bad but the Canadian market is primarily driven by supply issues, not red tape. There just aren’t enough houses/condos. You forgot cheap debt. There's also a ton of speculation. Jack up those interest rates and see where we're at.
Making it too expensive to buy a home does 'help' with prices, but it's more like treating the symptom than the cause. The result is there still isn't enough affordable housing in places where it is needed.
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All this is true and bad but the Canadian market is primarily driven by supply issues, not red tape. There just aren’t enough houses/condos. The resulting price boom isn’t a mere 5-10% increase, but hundreds of percent over the course of only 5-10 years. I’ve seen condo prices double three times in five years in places.
>> All this is true and bad but the Canadian market is primarily driven by supply issues, not red tape. My point is that if you reduce the red tape (and deadweight loss) there are actually people who want to sell, but wont sell if they are losing a ton of money on the sale. Reduce the loss and more supply appears. In the US this is a huge issue. If you switch cities twice and sell each time, your entire downpayment h…
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but... blind bidding is how everything works. If I was a CapEx manager at Y company, why would i reveal pricing of other bidders? It's a conflict of interest for the other bidders. Even if you were to keep the pricing entity private it's the opposite of efficient because creates this 'bit-wise' incremental bidding that destroys the price. Unless you did some kind of random candle auction, this is easily gamed for a s…
Are public stocks and bonds bought and sold with blind bidding?
There’s indeed an order book that’s “public enough”, but not every trading system enters every intent into the public order book. (Even as a retail nobody, I can create contingent orders that only become public orders once the trigger conditions are met.) I also don’t believe that individual bid/asks can be traced to a specific bidder.
Further, block trades are negotiated off-order-book and later reported.
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> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_equivalence Auction theory has so many assumptions that it really can’t be applied to buying a home. The link above assumes the highest bidder knows[1] the highest price the underbidder would pay, which is extremely silly. Apart from the fact that if you know the highest price of another bidder, then the seller also probably knows your highest price, and the seller can just ask…
Most of the people crying foul over the blind real estate bids have no idea about auction theory and what those assumptions are, and who is favored by the ways in which those assumptions do not hold, and how much. > The link above assumes the highest bidder knows the price of the underbidder, which is silly The first price auction and second price auction types are understood to be sealed bid. The English auction is…
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> Taking the metro many places (for example, from my apartment in an urban "luxury" apartment building to my boat near the waterfront in downtown DC) doubled the time it took to get there. It was actually faster to drive there even during rush hour where you'll sit motionless on the 395 bridge. Depends a lot on where you live and work. My experience was the exact opposite in Chicago. Heck, for some of my jobs I could…
> Depends a lot on where you live and work. My experience was the exact opposite in Chicago. Heck, for some of my jobs I could outrun car commuters on my bike pretty trivially. I got a taxi from Gare du Nord to a hotel on Champs Eleyse this evening -- took about 40 minutes to go 2 miles. That's ridiculous, but it's apparently a thing.
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All this is true and bad but the Canadian market is primarily driven by supply issues, not red tape. There just aren’t enough houses/condos. The resulting price boom isn’t a mere 5-10% increase, but hundreds of percent over the course of only 5-10 years. I’ve seen condo prices double three times in five years in places.
>> All this is true and bad but the Canadian market is primarily driven by supply issues, not red tape. My point is that if you reduce the red tape (and deadweight loss) there are actually people who want to sell, but wont sell if they are losing a ton of money on the sale. Reduce the loss and more supply appears. In the US this is a huge issue. If you switch cities twice and sell each time, your entire downpayment h…
> During last year’s election campaign, Trudeau’s party also proposed a ban on “blind bidding” for houses -- the prevailing system by which offers are kept secret when someone is auctioning a home. This is such a huge deal. Anyone who has had to go through the process of buying a home through a bidding war knows how unfair and one-sided this process is. It take a high-pressure emotional situation, and gives all of th…
I think that blind bidding is a bit of a scape-goat here: the problem isn't that the bidding process is blind per se, it's the complete lack of transparency. Once a house is sold, the price that it sold for AND all bids should be made a matter of public record — accessible without having to pay a ridiculous amount of money to view. Not to mention the ridiculous commission fees for realtors, and their well-known pract…
In such a case, I’d predict a lot of partnerships (or whatever the lowest cost legal structure that isn’t traceable over time if not activated) would be bidding for houses. My bid as “123 Main St Partners” can be as public as you want I suppose.