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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tradelite who wrote (22736)	8/2/2004 12:05:37 PM
From: Jill	Respond to of 306849

I forget the name of the (Chinese?) guy who bought up all the waterfront in Vancouver...and created all those beautiful highrises, interrupted by condos/townhomes with some housing for lower income people, parks etc...they are going to eventually make the seawall around the entire waterfront there...he has made a ton of $. However, there was some kind of toxic waste there...maybe it was built on landfill? I can't remember. But that was a danger that those who live there just ignore. I have to say, it was quite beautiful, and all the tinted green glass increased the light (I was there in August, when the northwest tends to be sunny), and it was easy to get to high-end groceries (a few minutes walk) and to the park/forest by car (10 minutes). It was all very liveable. OTOH, all that building had indeed created a crazy real estate bubble. The homes in the hills were really pricey, but those were from illicit $ from the heyday of the Vancouver brokerages when they did everything illegal and got away with it. So those had been around for a while. A small portion of Hollywood also had homes there, and certainly filming is cheaper there so Canada is getting its share of that. But, there is basically no industry there, no real jobs. Some are growing marijuana an hour or two outside of Vancouver and laundering it in certain banks (I read a Forbes article about this a while back). I can't see a fun way to earn a living there, you'd have to have a very portable career or travel often to the states. It really is a very liveable city, no doubt about that, but if you have ambition or a thriving career here in the states, it's not a reasonable choice. And for retirement, well, you have to not mind the rainy weather, I think most boomers are going to choose semi-retirement along w/ consulting and they are going to want good weather.

To: Tradelite who wrote (22736)	8/2/2004 4:40:35 PM
From: Tradelite	Respond to of 306849

Fears of a Housing-Price Collapse in U.K. Fade... This is for all you global housing fans. I can't post entire story, but it appears on page A9 Wall Street Journal of 8/2/04. Excerpts.... Worries about the effect a rapid fall of U.K. house prices would have on the economy are fading, just as the central bank is expected to raise interest rates later this week by one-quarter percentage point......... The Bank of England's rate increases, designed to counter inflationary pressures, have stoked fears that the moves could pop a widely perceived bubble in the British property market........ Some economists have begun to argue that even a steep drop in property prices wouldn't necessarily dampen the economy..... Last week, the Bank's chief economist said fears of a debt "time bomb" are being overblown, because the population has borrowed less to spend and more to invest than was often assumed, creating less danger of a credit crunch as debts come due.