Archive for category Canada
Will house buyers embrace the internet?
Posted by admin in Affordable mortgages, CMHC reports, Canada, Fraud awareness on March 16th, 2010
Buying or selling a home is among the most stressful experiences in anyone’s life, but it appears that estate agents are not at the heart of the problem.
The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has given a clean bill of health to the industry, pointing out that satisfaction levels are up.
However, the watchdog has shed light on the increasing influence of the internet on the way we buy and sell homes.
Now it wants to free up businesses that match private buyers and sellers in order to encourage more competition.
What is the future for internet sales?
At present, online services are dominated by the traditional estate agents rather than so-called “introducers”.
These introducers provide a website where buyers and sellers can find a property they like but are then left to conduct negotiations between themselves.
In the US, these currently have 15% of the market compared with only 2% in the UK.
The OFT wants to free them of the burden and cost of some of the regulations that come because each introducer is currently regarded by law as an estate agent.
They could be free from price negotiations and responsibility for ensuring that the property is described properly in an advert.
However, private buyers and sellers should be aware of the greater risks involved. For example, adverts could mislead a potential buyer about the state of a property, or the neighbourhood it is in, because those running the website would not have a legal responsibility to check that the claims are true.
Housing Starts Fall
Posted by admin in CMHC reports, Canada, Ontario on January 20th, 2010
New U.S. housing starts unexpectedly fell in December, pulled down by a drop in construction activity for single-family dwellings, a government report showed on Wednesday.
The Commerce Department said housing starts fell 4% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 557,000 units. Analysts polled by Reuters had expected housing starts to rise to 580,000 units. November’s housing starts were revised upwards to 580,000 units from the previously reported 574,000 units. The drop in housing starts was likely the result of unusually cold weather last month.
Groundbreaking activity dropped a record 38.8% to an all-time low of 553,000 units for the whole of 2009.
Starts for single-family homes fell 6.9% last month to an annual rate of 456,000 units after rising 4.0% in November. Groundbreaking for the volatile multifamily segment rose 12.2% to a 101,000 unit annual pace, after surging 69.8% in November.
Housing is on the mend after a three-year slump and new home construction contributed to economic growth in the third quarter of 2009 for the first time since 2005.
However data such as pending home sales and homebuilder sentiment have hinted at potential weakness in a sector whose collapse triggered the most brutal U.S. recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
New building permits, which give a sense of future home construction, rose 10.9% to 653,000 units last month, the highest since October 2008. That compared to analysts’ forecasts for 590,000 units. For the whole of 2009, permits dropped 36.9%, the department said.
The inventory of total houses under construction dropped 3.8% to a record low of 511,000 units last month, while the total number of permits authorized but not yet started rose 8.4% to 95,800 units.