Food Prices and Taxes in Canada VS. The Cost of Living in Mexico

Hello, I'm Debbie Simmons with the Simmons Lifestyles Real Estate Group, powered by Real Broker. My business partner, Mark Brotherton, and I, we serve the Central Vancouver Island real estate market area. This is your market report for the week of April 29th, 2024. So our topic of the week this week is food prices. I was fortunate to take in an interview this week by Dr. Charlebois. Charlebois is the director of the Dalhousie Analytics Institute, and he's written a book called The Food Professor. He calls himself The Food Professor. This man knows everything to do with food prices, how they got there, all the compounding effects of everything that goes on in our economy on the price of food. And why am I talking about this as a realtor? Because this is also affecting the real estate market. Anything that happens to our pocketbook from any segment of the economy affects the real estate market. It affects it in this way that people cannot save up for down payments because of food pricing. And then it carries on from there. And then that carries a domino effect through the whole real estate market, right from the level entry properties right up to the top, because people can't go up and out the top if people aren't coming in the bottom. So anyway, that's why there's a bit of stagnation in the market right now. Food prices are, as everyone knows, through the roof. He had some really interesting stats like 58% more Canadians are going past the best before dates on their food than they were 12 months ago. And sometimes this is dangerous. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes those best before dates are just a warning and really to help companies not get sued for not putting these dates on. That's it. But beyond that, some products you can consume well beyond, others you cannot. So this may eventually have an effect on our health. People are wasting less food. People are downsizing their food. They're downsizing from good cuts of meat to poor cuts of meat. They're downsizing from good food to bad food. People are consuming a lot of cheap carbohydrates to try to get through this period of inflation. With this new recent increase in gas prices with the carbon tax that was imposed on us on April 1st, and then another 6% rise on Monday in gas prices, this is going to even continue to cause hyperinflation in the food market for us. The energy prices are at the bottom of everything in our society, and food is no different. It's very shocking to me that people are having to do this. My parents went to university for years and years together, 8 or 10 years, and they were poor young students. In their era, they had to eat peanut butter sandwiches and crab dinner to survive getting through school. That was with my mom being a teacher way back then. Teachers didn't make very good money. They just barely scraped by to get through university. Average people are having to live this way now and pass their university years, and that horrifies me. My father became a diabetic by the time he was 32 years old because of eating this way. That's deeply concerning to me, more concerning to me than the housing market. Anyway, that's how these food prices and the shrink inflation are also affected. The real estate market is affected by that. Also, there are 4,600 products in the grocery store that are taxable. That is immoral. It's what the government deems to be snacks. With all the shrink inflation that's already going on also with these food companies, things like, let's say, a package of six granola bars were not taxable. But if it's shrink plated down to five chocolate bars, or sorry, granola bars, then it is deemed to be a snack by the government and is taxable. There are many, many items on that 4,600 item list that are being affected by shrink inflation as well. All right, so I'm going to share the stats with you this week. Again, a lot happened. We're well into our spring market, and the stats that I'm showing week by week are starting to show really consistently, as you will see. And here we go. All right, so we have, as you can see over here, oh, I need to go to page one. There are 23 new listings. Here they all are. And the highest priced one is 3.2 million, which is 3.8 acres of walk-on waterfront with a home on it on Brenton Page Road, which is on the northern border of Ladysmith Harbour. And then the lowest priced listing this week is $215,000 mobile home on West Down Road in Ladysmith. Weirdly, Ladysmith seems to be taking the highs and the lows every week on pricing. We had, as you can see over here, eight, say where it says pending, and you go to the second page. We've got eight new sales. We have 11 price decreases. So these are people, you know, serious about moving their properties. We have six new sales. Properties have changed hands, and the new owners took them over. And nine cancellations. And most of that, as you'll see here, were from a project. When you see a bunch of cancellations like that, it's usually indicative of that. Okay, so that's still good, strong market activity, spring market activity. It's been very, very consistent the last four weeks, usually in the mid-20s for new listings, in the six to eight for new sales, and so on. So it is staying very consistent. All right, so I just want to give you a summary of Michael Campbell's, my notes from Michael Campbell on Saturday. If you don't listen to him, you probably should, because you'll learn so much. There'll be a lot of new condos coming on the market, particularly in the Victoria area, because of these new capital gains that are coming in on June 25th. Those people will be very, very anxious to open their, to get their listings sold before the 25th, so they're not paying that incremental capital gains tax. Always talking about how this new capital gains tax are affecting 307,000 Canadian businesses to the negative, who were already marginal businesses. So that is, that is really scary to me. And then CRA has hired 5,000 new employees, and they've really upped their audits. And in order to regain the monies that they gave away during COVID, they are taxing us through the nose, of course, and the people, those 5,000 new auditors are going way back further in people's audits than they did before to try to find all sources to claim. Sorry, my phone's going there. To claim on behalf of the government, to pay for all their spending. So that's kind of scary for all of us. There's not enough, he's saying that there's not enough competition in the Canadian grocery market that the American grocer, large grocery store chains will not come here because of government policy. And so there's just not enough, not enough competition to bring those prices down. And also brought up again, the capital investment in our housing sector is going away when it's mandatory for our survival. Okay, so that's most of his notes. And then I just wanted to give my little segment on Mexico again. If the cost of living is bothering you, come and talk to Mark. Mark and I, we are specialists on the Mexico market. I am here now in Barra de Navidad, a tiny little town, which I call it my Mexico shamaness because it reminds me of shamaness only with a Mexican theme. It's a small little Mexican fishing village. But my cost of living is 40% down here of what it is at home. My groceries are about 40% and I eat incredibly healthy. Everything is down, down, down, down. My property taxes were $371. My car insurance is much lower. My house insurance is much lower. My everything is much lower. Going out is much cheaper. And my energy costs are tremendously down. I'm spending $150 a month on gas, where I was spending $800 a month on gas back home. And my hydro, I don't heat my house. So that's way down, way, way, way down. So overall, my experience so far here is extremely positive. I have a wonderful group of friends here, wonderful church. And my social life is very, very rich. My nutrition is rich. And I can't recommend it enough. You can still buy a decent home here. You can buy a nice single family dwelling here for roughly $400,000 Canadian. You can spend higher or you can spend lower. You can buy a condo. There are all different investment models here. So that's your report for this week. Thank you for joining us. We are very experienced realtors, Mark and I. Please give us a call at 250-246-0708 with any of your real estate needs. Have a great week ahead. We're professional, caring, and kind.