Summer Outlook - August 2009

News in the headlines today.

Real Estate Sales in Greater Vancouver hit highest sales level ever!

There can be no doubt that the real estate market is returning to a sellers market in the Vancouver marketplace and that values are beginning rise significantly, up 10% in price since January of this year, and now down only about 5% from the peak of the market prior to the recent downturn.

One of the hazards of the new confidence in the markets, however, is that there is still signficant bad news out there on the jobs front as well as continuing instability when it comes to lenders and mortgage finance. Bonds are still suspect, and alternative lending is fragile where it exists at all because of the US experience and lack of confidence in the secondary mortgage markets that used to exist.

Citizens Bank withdraws from retail banking.

Citizens Bank was a noble experiment in the retail marketplace by its owner VanCity Savings. However, it was badly capitalized from the get go, and their value proposition never really took off with Canadians. The irony to me is that the owner, VanCity, is a high touch extremely human oriented company, and yet Citizen's Bank was the furthest thing in the world from high touch, not matter how good their corporate intentions were in the beginning.

CAAMP says new home buyers are more likely to use brokers than banks to finance new home in Canada.

Mortgage brokers seem to have a made a major impact on new home purchasers in Canada with 48% of new home mortgages obtained through mortgage brokers in the past year. However, until we can make inroads into renewals (10%) and refinances (15%) brokers will still continue to be marginalized with the majority of consumers.