Comments on: Canada’s Revision of The Real Estate Price Index Is Unreliable, Warns Economist

By: Andrew Baldwin

Andrew Baldwin — Sat, 05 Aug 2023 15:30:44 +0000

I stopped looking at the CREA indexes a while ago. The Teranet National Bank HPIs have their problems but they seem to be much more credible than the CREA indexes. They have also greatly expanded their geographic coverage, pretty much eliminating the only advantage that the CREA indexes had over them.

By: YJ

YJ — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 03:16:43 +0000

🍒 picked

No one’s sees thre collapse until five years after.

GG NO RE.

By: Kate

Kate — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 16:00:02 +0000

Canada is full of crooks!

By: Woolsock

Woolsock — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 15:04:36 +0000

Doesn’t NS have pretty full, open data on this?

It’s probably, again, a provincial matter, but maybe there is something the fed government can do about housing: legislate transparency on these RE transactions, including who actually owns the property. Having all the information available publicly would be a nice nudge towards some sense of sanity, instead of this information being horded and manipulated by the RE industry, to the detriment of our household finances, our national economy, and our future.

Yeah, yeah, there should be some confidentiality for the purchaser, so maybe require the data be released 90 days post transaction. But beyond that: if you paid and it was foolish, you should look foolish. That just might be all it takes: fear of looking like an idiot.

By: Kathy

Kathy — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 14:41:48 +0000

It seems similar to the general trend for Canadian economists to reindex baskets more frequently. Statistics Canada is doing it with CPI, reweighing every year even though they know census data is done periodically because too frequent changes leads to volatile decisions that don’t reflect reality.

Canada is no longer interested in accuracy, but its economists want the smoothest line.

Economics is a strange field, filled with self-important morons that fail to understand real world impact—otherwise they would be in finance.

By: Ethan Wu

Ethan Wu — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 14:38:26 +0000

In reply to Omar`. There's no reason that people should not be able to access registry data for free in Canada. Ludicrous is the nice way of putting it. Corrupt is a more accurate way of describing it.

By: Trader Jim

Trader Jim — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 14:33:58 +0000

oooo…. Oxford Econ ahead of the crowd in the call out. I hope this changes how people view the data, and starts some public urgency to release a publicly available data.

I don’t have much faith in the public demanding higher standards though. The loudest voices are in a race to the bottom.

By: Omar`

Omar` — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 14:32:02 +0000

In reply to Kevin. Ranty McRanterson is right in regards to Canada being one of the few countries that doesn't have any free access to home sale/price data from countries. In the US the transfer history is public domain and you can just walk into a county office and look up more details for free. Imagine paying $20-30/pop for a whole province, then being restricted from sharing the data because it's owned by a private company that considers it proprietary? Ludicrous.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 14:28:24 +0000

Canada’s real estate data has always been a joke. It’s so expensive to buy property registry data that banks can’t afford it in some provinces.

Obfuscation by hurdles, but most Canadians prefer not knowing how things work. They’re just here to line the pockets of the rich, and hope one day they’ll look at them.

By: Jamie Price

Jamie Price — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 14:14:35 +0000

Did anyone trust CREA’s HPI? It’s slow and laggy, adjusted and weighed so that it eliminates short-term issues, and maximizes the trend.

Of course if the trend is point in the direction they don’t want, then it needs a revision!