VANCOUVER — The Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver says home sales have plateaued after reaching record highs in March.

In its third-quarter housing overview for 2021, it said the number of homes listed for sale in Metro Vancouver has fallen to lows not seen since 2016.

The increasing correlation between sales and new listings over the pandemic is consistent with more buyers selling their homes and purchasing other, typically larger ones, it said. First-time homebuyers or those who moved into bigger houses made up a large proportion of house sales, it said.

Andy Yan, director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University, said the earlier rise in sales could be attributed to seasonality where home sales see a surge in the summer as well as people spending the money they had saved up during the pandemic on buying a house…read more.

Canadian real estate has long been frothy, but how does it look compared to other countries? According to the US Federal Reserve (the Fed) exuberance index in Q1 2021, pretty bad. Only two G7 countries are considered exuberant markets (a.k.a. bubbles) — Canada and Germany. Those two countries are also the longest-running bubbles of any advanced economy. The longer a market remains exuberant, the greater the drag on quality of life and the economy. They also tend to require much larger corrections, with greater economic fallout.

Exuberance Index

We just took a dive into the exuberance index last week, so we’re only going over what you need to know. The Fed tracks global housing markets for exuberance, looking to identify bubbles. In this case, exuberance means explosive price growth beyond market fundamentals. When this happens, people are buying based on the excitement of paying more, or fear of being locked out. Whatever the reason, it’s an emotional one. By tracking this, they hope to prevent a 2006-like event from happening again.

One or two quarters isn’t a trend — it happens. The problem is when exuberance becomes persistent, without any correction. Fed researchers say five quarters of exuberance is when the market is exuberant. An exuberant market is better known as a bubble, and bigger corrections are needed to fix them…read more.

A ‘new city in America’, set to house five million people, is being planned by a former executive of Walmart.

Last week, Marc Lore, former head of US e-commerce for Walmart, unveiled plans for the new city, appointing a world-famous architect to design it. The billionaire called the plan for the sustainable metropolis, ‘Telosa’.

He hopes to raise $400 billion in funding to create the project from scratch in an American desert, ‘creating a more equitable and sustainable future’…read more.