I was interviewed by the Toronto Star’s New in Homes section this week and was asked my opinion on the next big issue that will arise in the Toronto housing market in 2018, and I said “data misinterpretation.”
You can read the article here: New in Homes
With last year’s GTA housing bubble about 8 months in the rear view mirror, and the market having seemingly adjusted to those measures, a new mortgage rule change will throw another monkey wrench into the homebuyers’ plans.
For the next six months, annual comparisons to last year’s prices will look very bad, and the articles and blogs will drastically overreact. I fully expect a Zero Hedge article on the Toronto housing crash to be heavily shared by the housing bears.
Many of the readers of those articles won’t pay attention to the details, and even many that do, a significant portion don’t fully understand what they’re looking at.
If the TREB sales data ever becomes public, expect a boatload of terrible blog posts with eye-roll worthy analysis, and mostly a bunch of people searching to see how much their boss paid for their house!
Having worked with housing data for over 15 years, it is about so much more than the average, the year-over-year change, and the unsold supply. It requires digging in very deep, and talking to a lot of people. There is so much value in the “on the ground” opinion, but you have to couple that with hard data. You can’t just casually peruse TREB’s Market Watch or download some high-level CMHC data in an ivory tower somewhere across the globe and understand what is happening.
If you need help understanding the market, understanding your project, registrant, or sales office traffic data, make a call to the ‘pen!
