May 2012 B.C. Economic Fundamentals

[Ally]

Good time to be a landord in Kelowna





Apartment buildings in Kelowna are like blue-chip stocks. Both are good investments, hold their value and will, time and time again, make the owner money in the long run.





"Kelowna is a AAA location for apartment buildings," Marg Gordon, CEO of the B.C. Apartment Owners & Managers Association, told the inaugural Okanagan Real Estate Investors Summit this week in the theatre of Okanagan College's Kelowna campus.





"What that means is if you buy and run a rental building, well, you will make money. It's a great investment I liken to buying stock in blue-chip companies."





Russ Syme, another guest speaker at the summit, agreed



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[Ally]

Employment growth on the upswing in British Columbia





When Tukiso Muzondo moved to Vancouver from Montreal last month, she did so with no illusions about the challenges she would face in terms of landing a professional job that matches her skills and ambitions.




"People who had been here all told me how beautiful it was, but in terms of the labour market, they were certainly discouraging," the 34 year old recent university graduate, with a master's degree in public administration, said.






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[Ally]

Regional unemployment grows as rest of B.C. prospers



As B.C. and other parts of Canada recorded significant job gains last month, the Thompson-Okanagan moved in the opposite direction, statistics show.





Figures released Friday by Statistics Canada indicate the region`s population and labour force shrank over the past year while unemployment rose to 9.2 per cent from 8.8 per cent in April 2011.





In the same period, the province`s unemployment rate dropped to 6.2 per cent from seven per cent in March as 19,700 jobs were added to the economy. Of those, 16,700 were full-time positions.





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[Ally]

Shell, Asian energy giants to build largest LNG plant in BC





Four global energy firms led by Shell Canada say they are going to develop a 12 million-tonnes-a-year liquefied natural gas plant at Kitimat, the largest by far of four LNG proposals for the B.C. Coast.




The announcement Tuesday catapults Shell and its partners into the leading LNG developer in Canada in terms of size. By comparison, competitor Kitimat LNG, which already has an export permit, plans a plant with a capacity of five million tonnes a year.




Although Shell has not released any project costs, a recent news article in a Japanese publication pegged the investment by the partners at more than $12 billion US.






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[Ally]

Developer gets digging in Chinatown





Anthem Properties is holding a ceremonial groundbreaking this morning on a $40-million condominium development in Chinatown, despite tepid pre-sales .




Robert Marchand, director of marketing for Vancouver-based Anthem, said excavators will move in on Monday to begin digging underground parking and preparing foundations for Union, a 133-unit condo project with 10,000 square feet of ground-floor retail.






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[Ally]

No clear evidence of a real estate bubble in B.C.





Is the Canadian housing market a big bubble ready to burst? Or is it steady as she goes?




Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has warned that Canadians are taking on too much debt against the value of their homes, and that could spell trouble.




But the latest report from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation is dismissing those fears, saying there's no 'clear evidence' of a real estate bubble.






Read the full article here.

 

[Ally]

Vancouver's real estate swoon deepens




Mayur Arora is seeing something few would have expected in Vancouver`s real estate market ` people walking away from deposits on houses, convinced prices will fall further.




`It happened twice in the last month. One [deposit] was $75,000 and one was a $20,000 deposit, the guys just walked away from it,` said Mr. Arora, who runs Oneflatfee.ca in Surrey, B.C. `They are going to wait it out. So they lost $75,000 and $20,000, but if the market comes down $150,000 on a $1.5-million house, that`s not uncommon.`





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[Ally]

B.C. home sales remain stronger in April







The number of homes sold through the MLSÂ System of the BC Northern Real Estate Board posted an 11[sup]th[/sup] consecutive year-over-year increase in April 2012.









According to the Board`s statistics home sales totaled 397 units in April. This was up 25 per cent from April 2011 and marked the strongest April sales figure since 2008.



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[Ally]

Toronto vs. Vancouver - which will have the highest house prices in a decade?




Toronto could see house prices hit the stratospheric levels of Vancouver`s within a decade unless ways are found to cool demand or boost the supply of single-family homes, says one of the city`s leading housing experts.




Too much concern has focused on Toronto`s condo boom and fears it`s about to go bust when the bigger issue for the city is the `dramatic` escalation in prices for single-family homes and demand that continues to far outstrip supply, says veteran housing consultant Barry Lyon.




There is a growing realization that the GTA housing market, and Toronto in particular, has become very much a tale of two markets ` houses and high-rise condos.





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[Ally]

Vancouver is a drag on Canadian real estate, says CREA




Vancouver is a drag on Canadian home sales.




That`s the conclusion of the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA), which stated in a report released on May 15, 2012 that Canada`s home sales edged higher in April, but that Vancouver`s market was a drag on the overall increase.




That`s a surprising conclusion given the mounds of complaints that Canadians have about the insanely high housing prices on the West Coast. But according to the CREA, housing prices in Vancouver are well off peak levels from the same time last year.





Read the full article here.

 

[Ally]

Charting a new course for forestry





Resource development in oil and gas has recently been touted as the centrepiece of Canada's economic future but the move to revitalize another historic resource industry, the forest sector, also merits fresh attention.




The Canadian forest products industry has been emerging from a difficult downturn by transforming itself. It has been changing its business model by improving productivity and competitiveness, diversifying products and markets, building world-class environmental credentials and looking to ways to produce new innovative products from wood fibre.






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[Ally]

Bubble talk just hot air, condo guru says





Condo marketing guru Bob Rennie has a simple response to talk that Metro Vancouver's real estate market is headed for a hard landing because of sky-high prices.




"It's not a bubble," Rennie, director of Rennie Marketing Systems, said in an interview following his keynote address Thursday to the Urban Development Institute.




"With 80 per cent of the [condo] market that traded in [Metro] Vancouver last year, you only needed a household income of $52,800 to purchase.






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[Ally]

Exports to rise 13% in 2013





British Columbia's exports will jump 13 per cent in 2013 after a relatively slow 2012, Export Development Canada said in a forecast released on Thursday.




Energy is B.C.'s largest export sector, making up 31 per cent of the province's exports by value. But while volumes have increased, those increases have been more than offset by falling prices, said Peter Hall, EDC's chief economist.






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[Ally]

Buying a strata unit needs extra care





Many first-time condo buyers rationalize a potential purchase something like this:




"I'm paying $1,200 a month in rent," they say. "The mort-gage on a sweet little place of my own will be $1,000 a month. So I'll be saving $200.




"Right?"




"Wrong," says Scott Hannah, the Vancouver-based president of the non-profit Credit Counselling Society, who has heard this kind of flawed reasoning more times than he cares to count.






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[Ally]

Natural gas producers in survival mode





Natural gas companies are get-ting antsy.




Sure, they can see the long-term potential of their industry, but first they need to get past natural gas prices that have hit rock bottom.




"In the current market environment there are natural gas producers who are definitely in survival mode and some of them won't survive - there are producers who are likely generating negative cash flows today," Barry Munro, leader of Ernst & Young's Canadian oil and gas practice, said in an interview.






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[Ally]

B.C.'s share of skilled immigrants decreased by Ottawa





B.C. is being constrained by the federal government in its efforts to attract the number of immigrants it needs to support economic growth in the face of a looming labour shortage, a new report finds.




The province`s share of economic immigrants, determined by the federal government, has shrunk in recent years, even as B.C. plays an increasingly important role in driving national growth, said the report, prepared by the province`s immigration task force and released on Tuesday.






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[Ally]

B.C's population continues to age faster than the rest of Canada





B.C. continues to grey faster than the rest of Canada, with seven of the 10 municipalities with the highest proportion of persons aged 65 and over located in this province.




And Qualicum Beach is still the hotspot for seniors, with nearly one out of every two people (47.2%) living in the Vancouver Island community - the highest share of all municipalities across Canada, according to latest Census data. Parksville (37.1 per cent) and Sidney (36.9 per cent) followed close behind, while Creston, Nanaimo and White Rock were also among the 10 in B.C.






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