HISTORY & READINGS at Brian Ripley's Canadian Housing Price Charts & Plunge-O-Meter

Zombie Real Estate

10/31/2016

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Zombie real estate in Vancouver BC is a problem. The owners have placed a high value on keeping them empty when vacancy rates are at historical lows. See the Beautiful Empty Homes Vancouver archive. In March 2016, theGeorgia Straight reported some 10,000 condos were vacant. The city now wants to tax the owners between a ½% and 2% of the assessed value; CBC News Sept 14, 2016.

As I argued recently in July in Part III of "Death & Taxes" if we all leased our land from the state (ourselves) and were left with only the market rates for the improvements that sit upon the land, housing would be affordable. Owners of the physical improvement of a dwelling, a factory or hospital would not be subject to wild swings in land value. The cost of servicing the land with utilities would be paid for by long term leases. Zoning could be amended when a change in land use was required. The stigma of renting would relax if we all were tenants in common.

As it is now with the state playing monkey business with interest rates (ZIRP and NIRP) and removing credit risk from a lender's balance sheet (CMHC) and reacting with "supra" taxes layered upon individuals deemed to be distorting the market, we end up with more complexity, uncertainty and unproductive investment.

Land management should not be in the hands of short term profiteers. There are alternatives. Land in the Fiji Islands is managed through three complementary systems. Leased land covers 90% of their territory (83% "Native Land", 7% "Crown Land") and 10% of the land is "Freehold". Source

If land costs were built on productivity incentives and protected from the boom and bust of demographic pressure, urban planning departments could create longer term strategies and developers could be more productive on the improvement side of land development. But with very high land costs, the market forces us to build to the minimum of efficiency standards and the maximum of financial rewards.

The crappy little toaster that you call an electric baseboard heater inside an inefficient envelope is indeed just a heat transferring conduit. The condo boom is a commodity arbitrage not an affordable housing plan. (The Condo Game, CBC Doc Zone, January 2015)

The Democratization of Production
Be lazy like a fox. WikiHouse

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Tesla's Powerwall 2 and Solar Roof Launch

The sun provides more than enough energy in just one hour to supply our planet’s energy needs for an entire year. Your home can capture this free, abundant energy source through rooftop solar tiles, turning sunlight into electricity for immediate use or storage in a Powerwall battery. Tesla, October 28, 2016

Don't Fight Forces Use Them

10/23/2016

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The Sharing Economy
Like most people in Canada, I'm conservative on fiscal issues, liberal on social ones and when it comes to what we do in our own homes, I'm perhaps libertarian as long as harm is not being done to those who dwell there or to our neighbours who also deserve their right to quiet enjoyment.

Airbnb (I track Airbnb, Kijiji and Craigslist rental listings here) is successful because of the demand for income in a state enforced "zero" interest rate economy where the incentive to access credit is greater than the need to manage one's balance sheet risk. It's all good if cash flow remains positive. There is nothing new or radical about Airbnb other than the technology that makes it possible to attract income from a wider network of sources. It's an inevitable outcome from the application of software and governments want their share of the private cash flow that has been drained away from the easier to tax business of commercial hotelier services.

The problem is not that Airbnb, Uber, Amazon, and all the transnational corporations have figured out a way to scrape off income from across national boundaries, but that our internal tax collection system needs to be modernized instead of the current model of punishment and reward. Long time readers of this space will recall my posts on the Automated Payment Transaction model where a micro fee of less than ±1% on every financial transaction is collected automatically at the source terminal doing away with all filing of personal and corporate income, sales, excise, capital gains, import and export duties, gift and estate taxes not to mention accountants, bookkeepers and lawyers hired to insure conformity to government agency rules since those government leviathans will disappear.

It's software folks and it's coming to a country near you sooner or later. So stop bitching about Airbnb and Uber and let loose the regulatory shackles. As Buckminster Fuller quipped: "Don't fight forces, use them."

Meanwhile the warring factions are at it:

New York Governor Cuomo signs bill that deals huge blow to Airbnb NY Post Oct 21, 2015

An investigation of Airbnb rentals from 2010 to 2014 by the state attorney general’s office found that 72 percent of the units in New York City were illegal, with commercial operators constituting 6 percent of the hosts and supplying 36 percent of the rentals.

Toronto drafting Airbnb regulations as available units soar
Globe and Mail Oct 19, 2016

Toronto city bureaucrats say Airbnb rentals in Toronto doubled from 2014 to 2015, with 9,460 rooms or entire units rented via the site that year at least once – as well as hundreds more listed on other sites such as HomeAway, VRBO, FlipKey, Roomorama, Craigslist and Kijiji. In some cities across North America, short-term rentals are allowed but licences are required and only primary residences can be used. In some places, the number of nights a year a unit can be rented is capped; in Seattle, it is 90 nights.

Neighbour complaints led Vancouver to sue over Airbnb rental
CBC News Oct 18, 2016

Chief Vancouver Licensing Inspector Andreea Toma said more lawsuits may be in the works against homeowners who are essentially running commercial enterprises in the form of black market hotel suites. The city of Vancouver wants an order prohibiting the rental of the suite for periods of less than one month.

City of Vancouver files lawsuit to shut down Airbnb host
Globe and Mail Oct 17, 2016

Although almost 5,000 listings appear on the Airbnb site for Vancouver, both city officials and Airbnb agree that the number of people who rent out units on a year-round basis is much lower.

And from Fortune Magazine Oct 21, 2016

In Berlin, Airbnb is fighting a city demand that it turn over information to help enforce a new law imposing fines of up $110,000 on people renting out more than 50% of their homes for less than two months—among the strictest regulations worldwide.

In Barcelona, Airbnb’s third-largest market in Europe, the city is imposing fines that exceed $65,000 for listings without proper licenses.

In Amsterdam city officials in April started scraping data from Airbnb and other short-term rental websites to root out illegal hosts because Airbnb will not turn over details on violators.

In Los Angeles, a study by the pro-labor Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy found that property owners with two or more listings generated 44% of all Airbnb revenue in Los Angeles.

In New York City, the state Attorney General found that, between 2010 and 2014, more than 300,000 Airbnb reservations violated the law, representing about $304 million in booking revenue, with about $40 million of that going to Airbnb.

Airbnb Home Rental Nightmares

The Future is 10 Years Away - Uber Freight

To start, the Uber Freight marketplace will eliminate that middleman and offer shippers real-time pricing of what it will cost to move their goods based on supply and demand. Source: Business Insider October 26, 2016

How long before we see real estate
middle men disappear?

Uncertain Uncertainties

10/13/2016

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"Whatever the cause..."
The WTO in their concluding paragraph from their September 27, 2016 Trade Statistics and Outlook is not sure why global trade growth is declining.

A number of reasons have been advanced to explain the decline in the ratio of trade growth to GDP growth in recent years, including the changes in the import content of demand, absence of trade liberalization, creeping protectionism, a contraction of global value chains (GVCs), and possibly the increasing role of the digital economy and e-commerce, but all have likely played a role. Whatever the cause, the recent run of weak trade, and economic, growth suggests the need for a better understanding of changing global economic relationships. The WTO, and other international organizations, are working hard to understand this current evolution and its implications for continued growth.

The bottom line is that the buyer sets the price and if the vendor agrees, the sale completes. The pitiful Softwood Lumber embargo is a case in point CBC News October 13, 2016. The U.S. does not want Canadian lumber at Canadian prices.

Notice on the WTO chart above that despite the last 90 months of ZIRP & NIRP, global trade growth relative to GDP has recently plunged and both variables have been well below their respective highs all during that 90 month or 7.5 year period. State promotion of credit expansion has worked perfectly at expanding credit and now the borrowers have the job of turning debt in equity via the long process of amortization or the quicker route of liquidation. If borrowers are preoccupied with debt repayment as the competition for income (sales) increases then sellers better plan on more price and currency competition as well.

The WTO projects that export growth in 2016 from North America will drop from their April 2016 guess of 3.1% to their current forecast of 0.7%.

I have been tracking Household Debt, GDP, Foreign Direct Investment and Balance of Trade and it's clear that for the last nearly two decades, net investment capital is outbound from Canada and in the last 7.5 years of ZIRP & NIRP, Canadian net trade has been mostly negative.

Investment capital travels to where the returns are high relative to risk. The cost of Labour is a key expense and sleepless AI labour is a direct competitor. ITEM CBC News June 15, 2016 "42% of Canadian jobs at high risk of being affected by automation, new study suggests"

On a provincial basis, Ontario has the lowest proportion — 41.1 per cent — of jobs at high risk of automation, while P.E.I. has the highest with over 45 per cent of jobs at high risk of automation over the next 10 to 20 years.

My affordability page has always used the Bank of Canada "bank rate" as an input for debt service ratio calculation. My back of the napkin calculation for a current stress tested 5 year term, 25 year amortization fixed mortgage relative to average provincial earnings is that in Vancouver 5.5 wage earners are required to qualify for an 80% loan to value mortgage when buying an average priced single family detached house. In Toronto 3.3 buyers are required. In Calgary 1.6 earners and in Montreal 1.1 earners are required.

The current levels of peak housing prices in Vancouver and Toronto requires much more labour input from a labour pool that must compete for income not just locally but globally as well and that competition is going to won by those with better education and mobility resources than their peers.

For those of you thinking of getting off the grid, here you go, the home farming robot:

Bob Dylan wins Nobel Prize for Literature
BBC News October 13, 2016

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The world’s first commercial drone delivery service has launched in Rwanda. The service is operated by Zipline, a US robotics and drone company who will make between 50-150 deliveries per day to 21 clinics in the western half of the country. QZ.com Oct 14, 2016