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Ok, I will buck the trend.  Despite the overall malaise felt by many consumers in the past two weeks due to the over stimuli of “crisis” this and “recession” that the underlying fundamentals of the Canadian Real Estate Market and more specifically the Calgary real estate market are pointing to a balanced market historically speaking.The problem we faced earlier this year was that there was  sharp and sudden drop in sales, BUT new listings kept coming into the market, the proverbial “Johnny come lately’s”  who were trying to “Cash in” on the boom.  That trend has continued to drop for the past three to four months.In the past four months the overall inventory has dropped over 20%…this is good.  New listings added is dropping every month in the past three…this is good.  We are headed for a statistically slower time for new listings added…this is good.  This all points to overall inventory levels reaching a more historically balanced level.Put another way, at the end of September 2008 we had YTD sales to listing inventory at around .43.  Historically we know that when that ratio is between .4 and .6 we are in a statistically balanced market.Here is a great article on it as well which looks more at Canada as a whole, I have captured a few quotes from the article as well in case you don’t want to read the whole thing. Fewer Canadian homes were sold in the third quarter and the number put on the market also dropped — signalling a slide in housing prices is beginning to slow, says the Canadian Real Estate Association.“We had a sellers’ market for several years and now we have a much more balanced market,” Alexander said in an interview.A drop in new listings helped to moderate the decline in prices, said BMO Capital Markets economist Doug Porter.“With fewer sales and fewer listings, it’s a built-in stabilizer as far as the extent to which you can expect to see prices to decline,” Klump said in an interviewAs the oil boom eases, Edmonton and Calgary led the decline in the number of new listings, posting year-over-year drops of 19.8 per cent and 11.7 per cent respectively.But Canadian homeowners shouldn’t expect to see the kind of price crash that their neighbours south of the border have experienced, Alexander added.“In the Canadian context, this is very much a cyclical event. The housing market is cooling down after a very hot run but the tide will turn when economic conditions improve and that will probably be late 2009 into 2010.” 

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