Tough sledding in Edmonton as spring and summer are officially cancelled. Is it me or did someone turn on the air conditioning too early and jinx the weather? One day we’re sitting on the deck having a BBQ at plus 20 and then the next we’re shoveling the driveway three times in one day.
It’s nice to be back blogging again after an almost a three week hiatus. I’ve been learning all I can on the fine art of facilitation and the common law requirements of agency. Dreary but necessary stuff as the October 1st deadline looms closer for the end of dual agency in Alberta. In some respects many consumers will find there might be some quantum changes to how REALTORS interact with them in terms of concurrent representation. Alberta will be the second province after Nova Scotia to adopt the “Transaction facilitation” model.
In other even more dreary industry news FinTrac has handed down new reporting guidelines for the Real Estate industry to assist in the tracking of proceeds of crime. Some of these changes are far-reaching and impact every transaction we deal with. Significant changes will occur in the areas of dealing with Canadian or Foreign owners living abroad.
I was wondering the other day just how many vacant properties are there at the moment an a quick search on MLS showed there are approximately 2200 in Edmonton. That led me to wonder how many had sold? Not that this is a telling stat by any stretch but in the last 60 days 784 vacant properties sold (vacant or never lived in) which isn’t bad as far as absorption – just about 5 months supply. The main reason I was wondering this was a comparison to how many Tenant occupied properties there are for sale and how many tenant occupied properties were sold. In that case there are currently 967 properties that are active on MLS that are designated as tenant occupied or have tenants rights applicable and there were 132 sales in the past 60 days which converts to approximately 14 months supply.
My thoughts here are that with so many vacant and seller occupied properties for sale, very few people are going through the inconvenience of showing the tenant occupied properties unless they are exactly what their clients are looking for. This brings up an interesting dilemma – should a seller market their property vacant where accessibility is greater, or collect cash flow even though it may take longer to sell?
The answer I guess depends on the property and the cooperative nature of the tenants residing in the property.
Sheldon, interesting idea to compare new/vacant/tenant occupied. I’ve been trying to make sense of this mess for a while now and found one interesting comparision is to look at the percentage of new/vacant sales and listing now compared to those percentages of the past. Last time I did this I found new/vacant made up about 37% of the market now. This compared to an average of around 25% over the last two years. Do you think the differential between the two is telling in regard to the speculative component on the market right now?
ya, welcome to winter! we had snow on the ground downtown vancouver on saturday. the vancouver sun run (the 26th annual) went on record as the coldest ever! at night it gets down to 0 or 3 degrees, brrrr. weather was better in early march. watching CNN’s report on the Dems primary and the folks in Philly are in t-shirts. Sent the sun over here!
I suspect that the sales levels for the next weeks statistics will be low given the snow storms, and then re-bound the following week. I was looking at houses on Sunday (and bought one) but open houses were deserted.
This blog has been very helpful to me during the house search, especially as I live outside Alberta but had to learn something about the local market.
Edmonton’s real estate will fair better than Toronto’s:
http://pricedoutinedmonton.blogspot.com/