The attention economy. We currently live in the most attention-scarce market in history. This requires people who serve products and services to that market to adapt at an accelerating pace. Things follow this rule in a variety of industries, even ones that operate on longer cycles, including politics, as we've learned.  The most epitomic illustration of this can be found in Netflix's documentary called "The Big Hack". When I look at this solely from the perspective... [read more]

Long-distance calling costs once played a role in purchase decisions. A few days ago, I was preparing a bit of a commentary on Rogers’ introduction of unlimited data. I was trying to conclude how unlimited data may play a role in making rural living a little bit more attractive. As an example, I can now stream Netflix at the cottage in Dwight, where Season 3 of Stranger Things would’ve previously cost me $250. Completely independent of my thought-gathering... [read more]

It seems like we've pretty progressively found a temporary new normal, with little change in most major metrics. The big one to watch for now is going to be price, which could be gradually dragged down by excess supply. In the microeconomic outlook, it appears we're already seeing opportunism propping up the market on a transactional basis, as we've bounced off fundamentals without rebounding from suppressed capitalization rates we saw in the past few years. It seems like... [read more]

Best case scenario forecast shows Canada's aggregate home price could grow a modest 1% by the end of 2020 If the pandemic continues to heavily restrict business activity through late summer, a national home price decrease of 3% is expected by the end of 2020 The aggregate price of a home in Canada climbed 4.4 per cent year-over-year in Q1 2020 High demand and low inventory in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa fueled rising home... [read more]

People seem to get a little bit of value and comfort from these weekly reports, so I'm going to keep doing them until that changes. While it's been interesting to watch things change due to negative impacts of covid-19 and social-distancing policy, the picture is obviously still quite unclear. As you probably know, I interview professionals from the real estate industry on a regular basis. This experience has given me the ability to apply both qualitative and quantitative analysis to... [read more]