Housing Crisis: Not Having Enough Housing Available? Why?

Hello, I'm Debbie Simmons with the Simmons Lifestyles Real Estate Group. We are a real estate group that services the Cowichan Valley mostly on Vancouver Island. We also go up to Nanaimo and North and down to Victoria if and when duty calls, but we mainly service the Cowichan Valley. I haven't done a market report like this for a very long time because the market died two years ago. When the interest rates peaked about two years ago, continued to go up a little bit more than that after that, but however, when they finally priced everybody out of the market, there was very little to report, very few sales, et cetera. But that has changed. I'm really happy to report. So our weekly market updates are back because they're worthy of doing now. So interest rates is where the rubber meets the road for us in the real estate industry. And we believe that starting in May or so this year, they will hopefully start to come down really depending on the inflation numbers. But we're really hopeful that that's going to start happening this year, which of course is going to fuel the market and the market will take off again. Not maybe so much on the high side for pricing, but at least our sales will pick up and people will be able to get into homes with reasonable interest rates. So that's very encouraging for us and that's the most important thing I really have to say today. But my topic of the week is housing crisis. So as we all know, there's a huge housing crisis both on the residential rental side of things and leasing and on the sales side in terms of not having enough housing available. So the government this week announced that it's extending its foreign buyers ban from 2025 to 2027. So instead of a two-year ban on foreign buyers, we now have a four-year ban on foreign buyers. Well, in the meantime, the government is bringing in 500,000 immigrants every year. So they're bringing in all these people and then banning them from buying any property. This is putting enormous pressure on the rental market. This is where our lower middle class, young people, students, and the poor all live in this category. And there's a tremendous pressure, even more so, being put on that segment of the market, which is completely unfair and it's virtual signaling on the part of the government. It's not helping anybody. We have very few foreign buyers in any case, maybe a few in the larger cities, but certainly on Vancouver Island, I've never seen, well, actually, I saw one in 22 years in Cheminas. In any case, it's not a regular occurrence here and it shouldn't happen and it's really going to hurt us going forward here. So write to your MLAs, talk to the Premier saying, what are you doing? Actually, it's the federal government, but they all have a say in this. I'd like to say something about the developers. Developers are really hurting badly right now. I never envy a developer when they do that well, they do well, but that's less than 50% of the time. And when they're losing money, holy smokes, does that hurt? They're sitting there with very high interest rates on their projects and their buyers have been priced out of the market. So their product is selling. So a lot of them have halted their projects. Some have gone into foreclosure and bankruptcy. When we need $5 million, we're behind $5 million single family units or actually single family and or condo strata units to correct our current housing crisis. So none of this is heading in the right direction in terms of governmental policy. So big concerns on that front. The macroeconomic picture will keep you informed that there's so much going on geopolitically around the world and it all impacts us in one way or another. So on a weekly basis, I will bring you up to speed on that. I'd like to encourage you all to watch Michael Campbell's money talks on Saturday mornings on his website because he outlines very succinctly each segment of the economy and how it impacts each other because it all impacts real estate. So it's really good to look at the macroeconomic picture when you're looking at making a big move like buying or selling a piece of real estate. So that's the market report for this week. I'd like to give a shout out, please, to Chimena's Public Market, to Warren Golding and Julie Stephens who have breathed new life into the building this last month. I strongly encourage you to go there and feel a new energy, eat the fantastic food that Julie's preparing and just support the local merchants that are in there. Thank you very much for listening and we look forward to talking to you again and conversing with you next week. Have a great weekend.