By Rebecca Wissink

Walkability is all about how friendly a place is for those who choose to walk - with the presence of sidewalks, footpaths, or pedestrian lanes, and favorable roads and traffic conditions for accessibility and safety. A walkable community has significant places to walk to, like restaurants, shops, and other amenities, and encourages its citizens to get out and mingle on the streets.

Walking not only offers health and economic benefits to homeowners, but from the city’s perspective, walkability is about health and fiscal responsibility too. The executive director of Sustainable Calgary, Celia Lee, says the city needs to invest in creating walkable communities. Lee suggests the increase in chronic diseases across Canada over the…

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By Rebecca Wissink Patterns in luxury home buying in Canada are not only influenced by economic factors, but also by demographics and generational characteristics. There are three successive generations that compose Canada’s luxury real estate market - Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Generation Y. As most Baby Boomers enter retirement, and Generation Y is just getting going, Generation X is entering the prime of their lives.  Individuals belonging to Gen X as they are commonly called, are those born between roughly 1965 to 1979 (different researchers will use slightly different years) with ages ranging from about 42 to 57. This generation is considered the Bust generation, given they are a small cohort and lost between two massive…

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By Rebecca Wissink

If you click on the Globe and Mail’s real estate page what you primarily see are articles detailing a housing market gone mad. Multiple headlines from various communities state this home has sold over list, attracted multiple bids, sold with no conditions, or sold on the first day. Perhaps the most ludicrous headline reads “This midtown Toronto home sold for $505,192 over asking despite busy street” (March 17, 2022). But wait, I can beat that with a Facebook status from a Kingston, Ontario Realtor® on March 21, 2022: “A house in Kingston sold today for $550,000 over the asking price of $800,000.” In Calgary, a home sold in February 2022 after four days on the market for two hundred thousand dollars over list. Ross Pavl reports one…

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By Rebecca Wissink

The Calgary Herald reported recently what Realtors® specializing in luxury real estate already knew first-hand – the luxury market has exploded over the last year, particularly between the price points of 1 million - 1.4 million dollars. Luxury real estate expert Ross Pavl reports “the luxury market in Calgary is doing really well, and mindful buyers who are not forced to panic buy to avoid increasing interest rates are snapping up homes that tick the right boxes, like those with a good location, or that back onto a green space.”

There is no denying that Calgary’s market is hot and breaking records. The Calgary Real Estate Board (CREB) has reported an astonishing 222 percent growth in sales, year-over-year, for homes listed over 1…

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By Rebecca Wissink

When I read anything that links Calgary’s current real estate market to the conditions of the market in 2006-07, alarm bells go off in my head. Rumours of bidding wars and offers over list price have come to Calgary. Inventory is tight and sales are up between 66-109% depending on the home type. The Calgary Real Estate Board (CREA) reported on March 1, 2022 “the benchmark price reached $596,400, which is nearly $50,000 higher than prices seen at the end of 2021 [a few months ago!] and over $90,000 higher than February 2021 prices.” I’ve written elsewhere for Ross Pavl that Calgary’s boom came later than most markets in Canada, not really taking flight until the winter of 2021. I remember what happened to real estate in Alberta in…

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VR in Real Estate

By Simon Rose

Virtual reality or VR is a kind of technology that’s been around for a while now. With VR, a person can view a three-dimensional image or perhaps an entire environment and even interact with it. VR is able to create and resemble how things will or do look in the real world. Alternately, VR can create a completely different fantasy landscape or an alien planet for one to explore. It’s been predicted for quite a while now that virtual reality would be the next major technological development. Historically, its been widely utilized in things like video games and the entertainment industry. Today, VR is being used notably in the real estate business. The ongoing pandemic and restrictions on people meeting in close…

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By Rebecca Wissink

From coast to coast, real estate records were smashed across the nation in 2021. Some markets saw insane price increases of 25-30%. For example, the Greater Montreal area gained 27.45%, Ottawa gained 23.3%, and Vancouver gained 18.62% (year-over-year benchmark prices from 2020 to 2021). Calgary and the surrounding communities of Airdrie and Cochrane did not see these astronomical surges. So, how did Calgary's real estate market fare in 2021? Calgary was late to the party, but in late 2021 when most markets settled down a bit, Calgary was just catching fire.  

Calgary’s market broke records of its own last year, and the area rings in 2022 with some of the tightest conditions observed in over a decade. The number of homes sold,…

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By Rebecca Wissink

The word suburb, suburban, and suburbia are all short for a “sub urban” area, meaning they are contrasted to the inner-city. Suburbia is the result of an economic explosion that occurred in North American post-WWII, along with the resulting social changes that followed. In America, returning veterans were able to get housing loans with low interest rates and small down payments for standardized homes being built en-masse outside of the city. Suburbia was partly enabled by Henry Ford’s cheap automobile, automation and cheaper goods, and by public transit, railways, and highways that allowed people to commute into the city from these new housing developments. These new areas of housing were necessary due to the baby boom that occurred…

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Calgary’s Resale Housing Market: The Overview

By Mario Toneguzzi

It won’t be another record year in 2022 for Calgary’s resale housing market but MLS activity is expected to remain stronger than levels experienced in recent years.\

Ann-Marie Lurie, the Calgary Real Estate Board’s Chief Economist, is forecasting overall prices in the residential market to increase by 4.46 per cent in 2022 compared to last year’s hike of 8.25 per cent with overall sales dipping to 25,598 from the record high of 27,686 in 2021.

In her annual forecast report, Lurie says the residential real estate market in the Calgary region is being supported by strong economic fundamentals.

Citing the Conference Board of Canada, Lurie says Alberta can expect annual GDP…

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By Rebecca Wissink

There is an age-old saying that applies to investments: buy low, sell high. And there is no doubt that housing has become an investment in the minds of many. Calgary, the third largest city in Canada behind Toronto and Montreal, is the cheapest of the large metropolitan areas for housing, as seen in Table 1 below. Does this alone make it primed for investors to start snapping up real estate? Not necessarily. This article explores some of the factors that might be influencing folks to invest in Calgary real estate. But first, let me address your shock that Vancouver is not bigger than Calgary, as I assure you this is not a typo. The city of Vancouver is actually quite small at 631,486 people. It is the Metro Vancouver area that is…

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