Is Trudeau finally getting something right on the housing file?

There’s been a flurry of Fluffy announcements of late about our housing crisis. The last one I heard was $15 billions to subsidize the mortgages of 30,000 rental apartment units over the next ten years. In 2015, Canadian author Hilliard MacBeth published a book called “When the Bubble Bursts; Surviving the Canadian Real Estate Crash.” A few months later Justin Trudeau became PM. The real estate market follows the laws of supply and demand. When more people want housing, there is upward pressure on price, whether you’re renting or buying. As Hilliard argues in his book, supply and demand were out of sync well before 2015. When PM Fluffy came in, he opened the floodgates for foreign students and foreign workers. In 2015, the average house price in Canada was about $400k. Today it’s over $700k. In 2015, the population of Canada was 35 million and change. We just passed 41 million. Along the way, the building industry has been plodding away at roughly 200,000 starts per year. Do the math. When you build 1.8 million units while increasing the population by 6 million, you’re completely destroying the demand/supply equation. That’s why the crash MacBeth predicted nine years ago has not happened yet. In conclusion, the Liberal’s goosing the supply side with incentives, while also restricting demand by reining in student and temp worker numbers, is clearly a step in the right direction. But we have a long, long way to go.

Canada hits all-time high for immigration

Here’s some good news for the Century Canada crowd; Canada welcomed 430,000 would-be Canadians to these shores from June to September. That’s over 140,000 per month! Meanwhile, housing starts were bumping along at roughly 20,000 per. You can shut down every Air B&B in the country and it won’t make a dent in the housing catastrophe the Ottawankers are creating for us. How the hell are we still on this path when everybody and anybody who knows anything about real estate has been waving red flags for years? Hilliard MacBeth wrote a book about it - eight friggin’ years ago! But, let’s look on the bright side. All our new Canadians are coming from places where they’re accustomed to far larger households than we are. Like double and up. All those nattily attired Nigerians you saw crossing at Roxham Road with their designer luggage? They’re coming from a place where seven to ten under a roof is the norm. Putting up one new build for every seven new Canadians sounds just about right!

Five years later Hilliard Macbeth is still wrong

There's a widespread belief that Canada's seemingly out-of-control real estate bubble is about to burst.

Hilliard Macbeth has seen it coming for at least five years. If you'd had the misfortune of heeding Hilliard five years ago, you'd have bailed out of the market and rented a place. After the collapse, you would have got your dream home at a massive discount!

Alas, the collapse has yet to happen. If you're one of those pathetic souls who acted on Hilliard's prognostications, you're now permanently doomed to rental, because the half-million-dollar house you gave up five years ago in anticipation of the imminent collapse of the real estate bubble, will now cost you a million to buy back.

Has Hilliard apologised? No. In fact he's got a revised edition out. Seems his theory was golden, just his timing was off...

Boy, can I ever identify with that! My theories on everything from oil futures to shorting Apple have been spot-on, but, more often than not, my timing was off.

But, I've apologized for my shitty advice and am doing penance, shooting spitballs of umbrage at the establishment in my role as the pot-addled hillbilly at Falling Downs, whereas Hilliard remains employed by a legit financial concern.

It's my impression that while real estate valuations seem grotesquely distorted, they remain tied to the basic laws of supply and demand. If you track population inflow from all sources, and compare it to new construction, it's obvious that we have a serious disconnect.


There is absolutely nothing on the horizon to indicate that this disconnect will be repaired in the foreseeable future.

Wynne and Tory discover Toronto housing bubble

And by golly, they're taking some serious steps to lance that beastly bubble!

What a pair of imbeciles!

Seems the Mayor of Toronto and the Premier of Ontario were pretty much the last two people in Canada to notice. It's been topic number one around office water-coolers and company picnics and at cocktail parties from Thornhill to The Beaches for the better part of the last decade. Hilliard Macbeth wrote a book about it three years ago. Alas, the market has ballooned at least another 50% since then.

Thank God our political masters are finally on top of this housing crisis!

Good things will surely follow...

Or not.

Hilliard Macbeth guns for self-fulfilling prophecy

He's a sly one, that Macbeth.

He's wagering a career's worth of credibility in this one shot at creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

CANADIAN REAL ESTATE PRICES TO COLLAPSE; SELL NOW!!!

So then of course everybody runs out and lists their Canadian houses and condos, and whoopsie... there goes the Canadian real estate market!

Everybody's a seller, and the only buyers will be opportunistic bottom-feeder "investors."

Hilliard would be forever commemorated as the genius who predicted the collapse of the housing market.

Coincidentally, Macbeth has a new book out that predicts the collapse of the housing market. Having Big Steve talk up the book on national media is going to goose sales 1000%.

I gotta get hold of Macbeth's PR team and hire them to promote Falling Downs. I'd own the blogosphere in no time at all!

Here's the truth about Canadian real estate values. There's really good values to be found in a great swath of rural Canada. There are many small towns within a two hour commute of Toronto where a very liveable abode, with a yard, can be found for $150,000 or less.

But the closer you get to Toronto, or the other boom cities that have the jobs and attract the new Canadians, the higher prices climb, and the more onerous the impediments to development become.

Supply restricted; demand rising. Economics 101.

His new book is called When the Bubble Bursts. Amazon has it on for $20.30 right now.

Guess I just saved you a twenty and change.