A press release becomes the news.

Yesterday I posted a link to a report by Genworth Financial that declared that "over the next four years, Vancouver condo demand is expected to slow to balance with supply, although a correction is not expected.". As one poster commented, Genworth Financial was one of the first in Canada to insure zero-down and 40 year mortgages as part of their goal to "make homeownership more affordable and accessible throughout Canada".

I'm not entirely clear how helping to drive up debt levels is helping this goal, but every company needs a slogan.

I see now that this story is running in the Province, pretty much verbatim from the press release. The story subtitle is 'growth to continue without any correction' which, though slightly plausible, is still surprising to see as a statement of absolute truth. Imagine a company issuing a press release with a prediction that their stock price will "rise about 6.2 per cent this year and average 4.4-per-cent annual growth through 2010".

I don't doubt that its difficult work being a reporter, but wouldn't it be more efficient and cheaper for the paper to just reprint the press release without the byline? If the market does correct, I expect we'll see a lot more of these press releases from real estate agencies, banks, mortgage brokers, etc. If we hit year over year price drops then we'll get the ones that say 'the worst is over!'.

Paying reporters to retype these press releases over and over seems inefficient at best.

Condo prices set to continue rising.

According to a report issued today by Genworth Financial strong demand will drive steady price increases in the Vancouver condo market until 2010.

"In 2006, Vancouver's condo market remained as strong as ever and the good news is that growth is forecast to continue without a price correction, so it is still a smart time for buyers to realize the dream of homeownership," said Peter Vukanovich, president Genworth Financial Canada. The Metropolitan Condominium Outlook reviewed resale condo markets in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver based on data from the Conference Board of Canada. New condo prices were not included.

According to the news release "Genworth Financial Canada, The Homeownership Company, works with lenders, mortgage brokers, real estate agents and builders to make homeownership more affordable and accessible throughout Canada."

So they're an impartial source for sure.

But heres a question I have: If the market will continue to rise gently until 2010 getting further and further away from rent values, what happens after 2010 and when is the best time to sell to realize gains on a Vancouver property?

Whither the bullish?

I'm worried. It seems like just last summer there was a positive vibe in the air, local dailies would run enthusiastic exciting headlines like 'BUY THAT CONDO NOW' and everywhere you looked you'd find press releases from realtor offices touting predictions of average house prices of 'ONE MILLION DOLLARS' in the next 3 years. All the local boards and blogs would have several posters explaining why 'NOW IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY'.

These days? We get headlines like 'SUPPLY OF CONDOS IS EXCEEDING DEMAND' and the REBGV benchmark price for a single family home has actually dropped below what it was last July.

But the most depressing sign of all?

I can barely find a handful of postings on local blogs and boards that are bullish on Vancouver real estate these days. So what happened? How has the shine come off this particular rose? Do bulls hibernate? I'm just looking for some reassurance that buying in Vancouver is a good idea right now.

Anyone?

Unsold condo inventory rising

According to this article in todays Vancouver Sun condo inventories have risen sharply over the last six months.

Greater Vancouver real estate markets saw a 55 per cent increase in inventory of unsold presale condominium units over the last six months, which may trigger a slowdown in future development, PricewaterhouseCoopers reported today.

The rising inventory is likely a result of fewer buyers being able to afford Vancouver's high-flying prices, Craig Hennigar, vice-president of PricewaterhouseCoopers Real Estate (PsC), said.

Hmm rising inventory, fewer buyers able to afford asking prices. But prices will keep going up right?

update: Here's the same story in Fridays issue of the Province.

Ouch.

Someone down in LA/Ventura county California has started up a blog documenting 'real estate haircuts' - money lost in the housing market drop there. Some of these look quite painful, the most recently posted example is an attempted flip that finally ended up selling after 377 days on market for an astounding $456,000 less than the aspiring flipper paid - a drop in value of 33%.

Examples like that make some of the recent foreclosures in Vancouver look not so bad in comparison. Someone over at the Vancouver Housing Blog posted a link to this local example on west 6th, purchased in March for $350k, with the bank now asking $319k for it 'as is where is'.

Callous media?

I was browsing some news on the US housing market, when I came across this bit about mortgage debt and ARM loans in Newsweek titled Escape from the Money pit. The title was an attention grabber, but it was the subheading that really surprised me though, in bold letters across the top of the column it says:

Home buyers thought they could put their house under their pillow and let the tooth fairy raise its value while they slept. Too bad.

..Which struck me as surprisingly callous for a column in a major publication. While I certainly agree that people are responsible for what they do with their money, I think we could show a little sympathy for people who got in over their heads and are upside-down on their mortgage. Lets be honest: the average person doesn't have the time or inclination to completely educate themselves on some of the finer points of personal finance. Its not that they aren't 'smart' enough, it's that life is full of things that demand our attentions but only a finite amount of time to focus on them.

People buy houses for all sorts of reasons and sometimes the timing is off, but how can you blame them for buying at the top when nobody knows what the 'top' of a market is except in hindsite? The fact that house prices can go down isn't a secret, but lets face it: It's not really the attribute that marketers are going to trumpet and going deeply into debt is the American way.

Affordability: Regina good, Vancouver bad.

Marco sent in this link to a Globe and Mail story about a housing affordability study that looked at cities in six nations, comparing housing prices to incomes. They rate each city with a number of years it would take to pay off the average home with the average local income. Canada as a whole is not bad at all, with a median multiple of 3.2, just slightly above the traditional 'affordable' multiple of 3.0.

Regina has great affordability, with a median multiple of 2.0, while Vancouver doesnt fare so well on the affordability scale. Vancouver is rated the 13th least affordable city in this study, with a 'severely unaffordable' rating of 7.7

The survey was conducted by Demographia, a US consulting and research firm. The full PDF survey report is available here.

We're so Bohemian.

The Toronto Star has an article about a condo development called the Bohemian Embassy - a name that was originally used for a series of literary / cultural coffee houses run by Don Cullen. Cullen is unhappy with their use of the name and talks about his first visit to the site:

There was no one to talk to and no literature available, but clearly someone was trying to "brand" their development with a name that sounded suitably hip. The trouble is, I invented that "brand" and the last thing it represented was culture-free, cookie-cutter condos.

Now being so very west-coast, I initally thought they were refering to bohemia townhomes in Vancouver, another development with granite countertops and sisal carpets that seems very un-bohemian.. or is it? Here's the wikipedia definition of bohemianism:

The bohemian lifestyle is often associated with cafés, coffeehouses, drug use (particularly opium, the "dark idol"), alcoholism, and absinthe (nicknamed the "green fairy"). Bohemians were associated with unorthodox or antiestablishment political or social viewpoints, which were expressed through extramarital sexual relations and voluntary poverty.

Ok, so maybe I'm wrong. Some of this sounds pretty Vancouverish: the coffee shops, drug use and particularly the 'voluntary poverty' bit about buying RE right now - but why so shiny? If we're going to glom onto the 'bohemian' concept it seems like developers could save a lot of money by skipping the clean new materials and simply throwing some absinthe in as a perk.

I think I have just the example too: remember that old porn theater in the downtown east side that is slated to become condos? Why bother with conversion when you could simply throw some old blankets over the seats and live in a true bohemian style. The Venus theater could become 'The Intra-Venus' a condo development like no other!

Now pass me that bottle and contract, I've got some investing to do!

the boom provides fuel for the boom

There's an article by Bob Ransford in Saturday's Vancouver Sun titled 'Its hard to pin down what's fueling the boom'. Unfortunately the online version of the article is only available to subscribers (here), but I found this section interesting:

It seems like the economic surge that we experienced this last year was almost wholly driven by a real estate-based frenzy that perhaps peaked over the last twelve months but remains the only visible engine of economic growth in these parts.

It was easier to make sense of earlier real estate booms in Vancouver when our resource-based economy used to go through cycles of expansion and contraction tied to commodity price fluctuations. It was even easier to make sense of the record setting real estate boom of the mid-1990's when a new international market discovered Vancouver as Hong Kong's sovereignty was about to be handed over from Britain to China.

So that was then, what's driving the boom now?

Pinning down what exactly fueled our latest trend-setting real estate boom is harder. Job growth is certainly one fundamental driving the market. Many new jobs created by the institutional projects that are part of the pre-Olympic period provided the wealth that brought new home buyers to the market.

The residential construction sector itself also was a significant job creator. Kind of like the chicken and the egg. It is somewhat scary that we have little more than this to point to as our engine of growth.

That got me thinking: In previous booms once demand was absorbed or the driving economic factors were removed the market went through a down-turn with lower house prices. People that needed to sell were faced with a depreciating asset, and it wasn't uncommon for people that bought at the peak to owe more on their mortgage than their house was worth.

So what about now? If the only driving force behind the boom is the boom itself then we never have to worry about a downturn! If the boom is providing the underlying economic factors for the boom then perhaps we've attained the real estate equivalent of perpetual motion!

Who wants to build a condo in Victoria?

The Cook Street condo site in Victoria is up for sale.

Vancouver developer Max Tomaszewski is offering for sale land in the heart of the village for $15 million, along with plans for a residential and commercial development dubbed Castana.

The developer is moving on to a Marina project and several development projects in Europe, but has said that if a buyer can't be found they will complete the project. Delays on the Cook Street project have left a lot of residents unhappy:

Word that the property isn't being developed quickly is crushing news to the Fairfield community that has been involved with numerous meetings on various proposals for the site since 2002.

"We want it completed," said Wayne Hollohan, chairman of the Fairfield Community Association's planning and land-use committee.

He added it's disappointing that houses have been demolished on the site, Food Country is closed, and employees have been laid off but still construction hasn't begun.

Amid escalating rumours about the project, Tomaszewski was asked in December if the property was sold. He replied he was tired of the "wild rumours" about the property and assured that construction would start that month.

There is no activity on the site and the building permit still hasn't been taken out at the City of Victoria.

The development permit on the site expires in September 2008.

I haven't been following the market in Victoria - are condo prices falling faster there than in Vancouver? Is it no longer wildly profitable to be building condominiums on the island?

hump.

There seems to be a generally accepted argument that if/when Vancouver's real estate market hits a downturn it will be Condominium prices that will be hardest hit. This idea seems to be based on a couple of factors: Houses come with land attached which adds value, and Vancouver's previous experience with the leaky condo disaster hit condo values hard.

In light of this it is interesting to see what the REBGV detached benchmark price has done in the last six months:



As you can see prices didn't stop rising after the July assessments values were recorded, they continued to rise for a couple of months, peaking in September 2006 and sliding down since then. According to the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver the 'benchmark' single family detached home is worth just slightly less than it was in July '06.

The REBGV benchmark for attached and apartments also peaked in September '06, but neither has dropped below their July value yet:



Attached is pretty flat, while the apartment benchmark dropped about 5 grand before it ticked up slightly last month. Any bets as to when we'll see the peak price of September '06 again?

Royal Bank raises 5 year mortgage rates.

Residential real estate rates just went up today at the Royal Bank:

Canada's largest bank said Monday it is increasing six-month rates by a tenth of a point and closed loans ranging from one year to five years by a fifth of a point.

The changes are effective Tuesday and mean a three-year loan rises to 6.6 per cent, while a five-year mortgage increases to 6.65 per cent and a 10-year term to 7.4 per cent.

The changes reflect rising costs of borrowing in the bond market, where banks finance their house lending.

This is interesting in light of several statements I've seen predicting a lowering of rates this year. If rates inch up further how much of an impact will we see in the Vancouver housing market with affordability rates nearing %75 of average pretax income?

Rate changes affect first time buyers as well as current owners. VHB has an interesting post about the renewal gap and what that can mean for home-owners and potential move-up buyers.

Renting in Vancouver 'a good deal'

There's an article on the CBC website about a CMHC statement that renters in Vancouver "get better value for their money than almost anywhere else in the country". It's almost like they've taken the common 'housing bubble' argument and turned it upside down. One way to look at the disparity between property values and rent prices is to say that there is no support for current prices in rental values. Another way to look at the same issue is to say that renters are getting a great deal since rental costs are nowhere near purchase costs.

CMHC analyst Brian Yu said rents in Vancouver are still comparable to many other cities in Alberta and Ontario.

He also noted that rents don't reflect the fact that homes in Vancouver are the most expensive in the country to purchase.

He cited the example of a two-bedroom condo in Calgary that costs almost as much to rent as it does in Vancouver, even though real estate prices in Vancouver are up to 40 per cent higher than the Alberta city.

As he points out, one of the reasons that rent is lower in Vancouver is that we have legislated rent controls, while Alberta does not. Certainly this would play a part in the discrepancy, but I don't think you can discount the income side. If rent in Vancouver were to increase 40% to make up for that difference how many people would stay here with current income levels. How much harder would it be to find people to fill those entry level jobs?

Stadium housing.

Bob Rennie has a plan: Tear down the leaky stadium and replace it with (hopefully non-leaky) condos.

He estimates the land BC Place sits on is worth anywhere between $250 million and $400 million, depending on the kind of density the City would allow. "So if you look at that value and what the province and the City could do with that money elsewhere, there's just no return in owning it as BC Place so that you can have the Pope or the Queen come every 10 years."

How low can oil go?

How far will oil prices drop, and what effect would that have on our local real estate market? There is a theory that part of what has driven our market is wealthy Albertans profiting from high oil prices buying up BC real estate.

Oil is now down to around $55 per barrel from a peak of $77 in late august. In the last week alone prices have dropped $5.

There's an article on MSNBC today about the lower oil prices, some of the factors behind them and predictions for the future.

There a few oil analysts who believe oil prices could be headed for a much bigger fall —especially as heavy investment in new production during the recent price run-up begins to bring a big increase in supplies to market. Even at $55 a barrel, that investment in new production will remain strong, according to Peter Beutel, who follows the oil market as president of Cameron Hanover.

“We will find a lot more at these prices,” he said. "A proven barrel of oil is how much you can get at today’s price. I believe we have that a lot more oil on this planet than people believe. And we are going to find it over the next few years."

Beutel thinks oil prices could fall as low as $20 a barrel in the next 4 to 8 years before beginning to rise again.

So anyone think there's a chance in hell of seeing oil at $20 a barrel in the next 4 to 8 years? And what sort of effect would that have on our real estate market? I could see lower gas prices (along with improved roads) possibly driving demand in the suburbs, but I wonder what sort of effect lower gas prices would have on the income side of the equation, particularly if there's anything to the 'rich Albertan' theory.

Is this a bubble?

Take a look at this chart and tell me if it looks like a bubble to you:


What does this graph show you ask? Thats the number of 'bad news' bearish bubble blogs focused on the BC / Lower Mainland / Vancouver real estate market over the last couple of years.

1) March 2005: Vancouver Housing Blog

• - the original and still the key source of data on Vancouver housing bubble info and economic analysis.

2) Nov 2005: Rob Chipmans

• - not actually bearish, but I give him half a point for being somewhat open to the naysayers and sharing data.

3) June 2006: VancouverCondo.Info

• - Hmm.. Hey that's me! You are here.
  

4) Oct 2006: Vancouver Unrealestate

• - Solipsist brings more humor and a personal touch to the realm of those who just want a home to live in but aren't willing to pay double the rent value for it.

5) Dec 2006: BC Housing

• - "uncertain buyer" just sold his house and is watching prices slide down for the last few months. He's looking for indicators that its a reasonably good time to buy in the interior.
  

6) Jan 2007: Financial Planning and Personal Sanity

• - A financial planner / home owner in langley examines the downside of the BC market with a focus on graphing past market data and drawing connections to the current market.
  

All of these blogs are updated regularly, most every day or two. See that upswing in the last four months? Clearly this growth is unsustainable - it looks like we have a 'bubble blog bubble'.

I will say one thing though: With all this focus on the Vancouver market anyone doing the most minimal research should not be caught off guard if real estate prices continue to drop for quite some time.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to make the big bucks. I got a tip about an internet startup that will be selling pet food online. Looks like a sure thing!

what will make prices rise again?

Last summer with all the rush to 'buy now' and steadily increasing prices in the Vancouver real estate market there was a prediction about house prices in 2010. Essentially someone took the rate that price were going up at that point and extrapolated out at the same rate to hit the prediction of an average house in vancouver going for one million in 2010. I must admit I also got swept up in the excitment with my bold prediction of condo prices reaching an average of THREE MILLION DOLLARS.

Unfortunately for us soothseers prices have actually been flat or dropping month after month since last summer, and its starts to get harder to see how we could ever hit that estimate.

So what are the conditions that could cause prices to shoot up again to hit that 1 mil in 2010 extrapolation? I've come up with a few:

1) Oil hits $4,096 per barrel. Flush with cash, the Alberta government buys a house in vancouver for every man, woman, child and house-pet in the province, whether they want it or not.

2) The Canadian government starts printing more money. LOTS more money. A loaf of bread costs $80 bucks and the fifty dollar coin is introduced into circulation.

3) Vancouver incomes double in the next year and more than half of them come with a rock solid 10 year contract and a lifetime supply of free bread.

4) Local real estate marketers develop a 'mind control ray' that convinces people they must 'buy now or be priced out forever'. The ray also convinces banks and lenders to hand out loans that are 15x stated income.

5) Demand from planet Zegnbar skyrockets. The Zegnbarian exchange rate is so favorable that a Zegnbarian toenail clipping is worth about $460,000 CND.

Thats about all I can come up with on this Monday morning. Have I missed any?

Farewell Anonymous

Well, I've gone and done it. I've turned off anonymous comments. Everyone is welcome to sign up for a blogger account and post away under a user name - You will of course remain anonymous, you just won't be called anonymous. If you're posting at the Vancouver Housing Blog, Vancouver Unrealestate, BC Housing or Mohicans new blog you already have an account that will work here.

Reductimat, wannaget2calgary, anonymous and all others that requested I get rid of anonymous comments: you were right and I was wrong. Its very hard to track a conversation happening between a bunch of anonymous posters and we were getting too many insults going back and forth. Can't we all just get along?

New Lower Mainland real estate blog

'Mohican', a financial planner in the Fraser Valley has started a new blog graphing and analyzing some of the quirks of the lower mainland real estate market. Financial Planning and Personal Sanity looks to be off to a great start with a look at fvreb statistics and an exploration of the correlation between rental vacancy rates and price growth.

BC Place: They all fall down.

The roof at BC place stadium has collapsed under the weight of rain and snow. Here's a story in the Province about the roof collapse. And here's the story in the national post. From the province story:

About three weeks ago, Graham Ramsay, BC place's business development director said that contrary to some reports in The Province, the Teflon roof did not need to be replaced, as a review conducted by its builder shows it is structurally sound

Its a cheap shot, but this comment by jojuchst over at Chipmans blog made me laugh:

Wonder if RE will collapse like BC Place did this afternoon?? They say hot air is supposed to be pumped in to melt the snow so w/o hot air pumping it up it could collapse... BC Place that is.

Comment tips

One of the best things about running this blog is the commentary from the readers. I appreciate your posts whether I agree with them or not, and I love seeing on-topic links to current Vancouver real estate news or commentary. Unfortunately Blogger doesn't make it very easy to make clickable links, italics or bold text in your post comments. To do these three formating tricks you need to use some basic HTML. I've had a request to make a little cheat sheet for those of you that want to put links in your comments so here it is:

<a href="http://vancouvercondo.info">link text</a>

This is probably the easiest way for you to add a clickable link to your comment text. You can simply copy the above HTML code and replace my URL (http://vancouvercondo.info) with the URL of the page you want to link to, and replace the words 'link text' with whatever you want the link to say. Just make sure you have the "quotes" around your URL or blogger will complain.

To make text bold use this simple code replacing the words "bold text" with your own:

<b>bold text</b>

creating italic text is very similar:

<i>italic text</i>

So there you go! It may seem a bit strange at first, but with practice it becomes pretty simple. I'll add a permanent link to this post on the sidebar soon for future reference. If you have any question just post them below.

Now back to the real estate!

Dangers of the 'wealth effect'

Here's some interesting commentary on property tax assessments and the downside of the 'wealth effect' by Chris Olsen of CTV's Olsen on your side. The 'wealth effect' is what happens when people feel richer due to higher assessments and are more willing to go into debt based on those paper profits without considering the potential downside.

Most regular Vancouver real estate blog lurkers will know all about our very poor affordability index compared to other Canadian cities and the related downward pressure put on prices, but its a great basic primer for those that haven't considered such things. Excerpt from the link above:

The less affordable houses are -- the harder they are to sell. That puts more pressure on housing prices to fall. RBC predicts the Vancouver housing market is near a turning point -- where prices will begin to fall. The signs are all there. The number of sales is down. The number of houses on the market is up. So that's the reverse of what we've been used to. Now there are more sellers than buyers. So RBC is saying that house prices are going to drop. By how much is the big unknown. Nobody knows. Hypothetically, let’s say they fell by a third, that would only bring prices down to where they were two or three years ago. We'd still have the most unaffordable houses in the country. Which brings us back to the original point. Given all these indications that house prices could fall - it's dangerous to borrow against the value of your house when that value is expected to drop by an unknown amount. Remember -- you'll still have to pay back whatever you borrowed.

Chilean housing debt

You think vancouver is in a tricky spot for real estate? At least we don't have housing debt protestors setting themselves on fire. Thats whats going on this reuters news photo.

A man doused himself in fuel and set himself alight outside Chile's presidential palace on Thursday to protest housing debt. He survived and was arrested.

Television pictures showed the man in flames before he jumped into an ornamental pond in front of the La Moneda palace in the heart of the capital of Santiago. The water extinguished the fire, allowing police to fish the protester out of the pond and arrest him. He was hospitalized with burns over 11 percent of his body, local media reported.

Indebted house owners have staged a series of protests in Chile against what they see as extortionate rates they have to pay to service their mortgage debts.

Thanks Jaime for the link to the horrifying picture.

More million dollar houses.

Todays Vancouver Sun leads with the cheerful headline House millionaires double in the province. Are these people that own or owe a million dollars?

Most new paper millionaires own single-family houses. There are 38,027 such homes worth more than $1 million according to 2007 property assessments -- 18,459 more than a year ago.

And the number of condominiums assessed at more than $1 million increased by almost three quarters to 3,260 properties.

As BC real estate association chief economist Cameron Muir (née CMHC) points out this is based on the july 05- july 06 assessments which saw some of the biggest price increases. Prices for the last six months are doing something strange - they've actually been dropping in many categories since a price peak in september 2006.

Muir added that assessment increases are only "paper profits."

"It's the equity in your home. Today it may be high, [but] the market may change and it may not be so high in a few years," he said.

Is that the most pessimistic Muir quote yet?

Extrapolations.

Property assessments are out now and we've seen an astonishing 25% increase in prices from july to july. If we extrapolate those gains into the future we'll see an average home price that is 8,000 times the average Vancouver income before too long!

On the other hand those assessments are six months old and if we were to extrapolate the price change month over month based on the last months price reductions we'd see the average house sell for twelve dollars in just a few years.

Extrapolating is tricky business!

Hot Tip: Buy Now!

The Province has published a list of top tips from financial professionals, most of these are the handy standards like diversify, keep an eye on interest rates, etc. There is one stand-out hot real estate tip from Carey Ellingson, a Scotiabank branch manager in Sherwood Park, Alta.: BUY NOW!

Ellingson says the new mortgage options of zero down payment and amortization periods up to 35 years can help first-timers to buy a home before prices rise out of reach. He expects real-estate prices in some provinces to rise further. If you are a borderline buyer today, "the longer you wait, the less opportunity you will have," Ellingson says. "Take the leap of faith" and buy while you can.

In some provinces price may rise further! You can take that to the bank, so buy now before you and everyone else is priced out forever. Certainly don't waste your time trying to save up a down payment!

I'm guessing once we reach the 'price out' stage all home owners will be billionaires and there will be no more buying and selling of houses? First we sell to locals, then maybe Americans (as long as their economy doesn't take a nose-dive) and then to countries further afield, perhaps even buyers from other planets! The Japanese might have an advantage here with bold 60 year mortgage terms.

Now some of you 'sceptics' will think that a bank representative would encourage 'zero down & 35 year terms' simply because it means several hundred thousand dollars more in profit from each customer. This is simply not true!

A long amortization period can enable low monthly payments initially. But as your income rises, Ellingson advises you to "pay it off early" and save interest costs.

His tip doesn't advise on what to do if your income drops or sees an interruption in the next 35 years, but if you're bold and brave enough to buy in Vancouver right now I'm sure you will be able to see your way through any adversity.

BC Assessment open to the public.

Myraa Posted this link to the BC assessment website which is open to the public and free to use until March 15th. This is a treasure trove of information if you are curious about assessed values on property in Vancouver, and includes info on sales that took place last year. You can search by address to check a block of homes at a glance.

From the BC assesment site:

Assessments and Sales by Address is a free, online service that enables BC property owners to audit our assessments by comparing the value of their property to others in their neighbourhood. It is available during the property assessment appeal period from January 2 to March 15, 2007.

They will also email you detailed property reports through their sales select system.

Thanks Myraa!