This morning on Global News they were reporting that the Calgary Real Estate market was strengthening. Of course we are thankful of this reporting, BUT once again they interpret the data incorrectly which results in the story being slightly skewed and unfortunately misleading to the public.
Let me explain. The reporter, Cara Fullerton, correctly mentioned that the real estate market in Calgary has picked up and mentioned that the reason’s are because of lower mortgage rates, and because of lower house prices. Both of these are true and accurate as to explain our recent success in the Calgary Real estate market.
But hold the phone, just when I though we would get through a media story that is reported properly she goes on to show the year over year price differences (prices were shown as 8.7% lower today then they were in May of 2008) and makes the correlation that prices are falling right now, which is not true. In fact in May prices rose as they did in April.
As well mortgage rates are not falling, they are in fact rising.
This is misleading. People buying in Calgary right now need to decide if they should contionue to wait? Mortgage rates AND house prices are on the rise despite what the media tells you.
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By davers, June 25, 2009 @ 8:18 pm
Prices rose in April you say? CMHC says so, but they have a vested interest in people buying houses, so I always take what they say with a grain of salt.
Teranet shows 10 straight months of decline in Calgary. I would tend to trust the teranet data more simply because their sample method makes a whole bunch more sense to me than the benchmark method. http://www.housepriceindex.ca if you want to check it out.
My sources are Calgary Real Estate Board Metro Calgary Single Family Homes. The methodology on the Teranet site shows a different calculation then simple median prices of all real estate year over year that I am using.
- Greg