Afriend in corporate finance forwarded me an e-mail Christmas card the other day. Over the caption - Merry Christmas 2008! - it showed a financial graph rising up from the bottom of the page in a jagged line to a peak, then falling down in a symmetrical jagged line back to the bottom. It took me a second to see that the graph was shaped in the perfect outline of a Christmas tree.
Gallows humour, but no denying it: The bubble has now burst. And in B.C. real estate, it's almost certainly not finished deflating. In a December, 2008, economic update, Royal Bank of Canada described the B.C. real estate market as being in "full-blown correction mode" and "unravelling fast."
Meanwhile, bloggers are
gloating. I'm talking about those real estate death watch sites such as Vancouver (un) Real Estate (vancouverunrealestate.blogspot.com) and Condohype (condohype.word- press.com). After the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver called off its 2009 conference and trade show two weeks ago because of the downturn, the blogger-in-chief of Condohype wrote, "Too bad the party's cancelled because that activity sounds awesome. In my book, it's an invitation to show up in my 'The Blogger Was Right' T-shirt with my dogs Case and Shiller. I'm devastated this can't happen now."
The sarcasm is perhaps a little undignified, but you can hardly blame them for feeling satisfied. They diagnosed market madness. And, with varying degrees of insight and eloquence, they were correct. That bull market really had distorted our view of certain things. It had changed us, or at the very least it had changed the way we relate to the places where we live.
In this column, I have discussed these changes over the past year in terms of three imaginary cultural indexes. And in each case, we can now see how they've been inverted in the same fashion as the Christmas tree graph.
My proposed Real Estate Preoccupation Index tracked the fanatically increased amount of time some of us were spending following the latest real estate listings. And I think we can pretty confidently say now that this index has plummeted. Burst bubbles are a lot less interesting to watch than inflating ones. Instead of congratulating us on our wisdom and financial acumen, the plummeting price line rebukes us. And what kind of sport is that?
The Personal Humiliation Sustainability Index tracked the dwindling value of actual houses compared with the speculative bits of turf on which they were built. It has, of course, also reversed. Lot values in my part of the city have dropped more than 20 per cent by some estimates. And it is now not uncommon to read a real estate listing that makes no mention of the redevelopment potential of the property. Ad copy is finally addressing buyers and acknowledging that they may merely be looking to purchase a house.
The Real Estate Agent Celebrity Index meanwhile - which I suggested to measure the social ascent of the BMW-driving, Rolex-wearing agent classes - has likewise taken a beating. Over at Condohype, someone is chortling on the bulletin board about his agent neighbour, forced to trade in her leased Porsche for a "well-used Cadillac."
I was reminded of the dynamic while checking in on an open house recently. The name of a very high-profile celebrity agent had been hanging on the sign out front for an unseemly length of time. And when I went inside, I found her sitting alone in the empty bay window of the even emptier living room. No assistant bringing cups of coffee. No inspectors crawling around the attic with clipboards, frantically scoring the place in advance of a last-minute offer. No other potential buyers at that moment. Nobody at all but us, and the echoing, empty house.
And without diminishing the hardship that this bull market has imposed and will continue to do so, I think there was a kind of positive transformation in evidence there. Not a "window of opportunity," as the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver has described the present situation. Not a "golden age for first-time buyers," as an independent real estate agent suggested in a promotional e-mail I received this morning.
Just an unwinding of the madness. It was a house. It was for sale. I looked around and didn't think it was the house for me. So we covered off the vital stats quickly enough, the agent and I, standing there with the dust motes descending. But then it was as if the house itself were telling us to move on to something else, something really worthy of preoccupation. So, before I left, we talked for a while about kids.
Timothy Taylor is a novelist
and journalist based in Vancouver. His latest book is the novel
Story House.
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