Greater Fool - Authored by Garth Turner - The Troubled Future of Real Estate
Book and Weblog - Authored by Garth Turner

  • The last suckers
    If you’re thinking about a 30-year mortgage, think fast. Our elfin but brutish finance minister is about to murder it. Maybe within days. Of course, let’s enjoy the irony. It was F, after all (as I detailed on this wretched blog yesterday) who invented the 40-year amortization, just so renters could become owners but without [...]

  • Canadian subprime
    Does Canada have a subprime mortgage problem? You know, Oakies buying McMansions? Loans for fogging a mirror? You bet your beaver we do. In fact, those profligate Yanks have nothing on us when it comes to taking a perfectly useful asset like a home and turning it into a pile of casino chips. We‘ve systematically [...]

  • Insecurity
    Tough numbers. The price of houses fell in 70% of the cities surveyed. In the four largest, sales crashed by two-thirds last month. America? Nah, try China. Now this might be relevant to Iris for two reasons. First, the exodus from real estate and into liquidity is a global trend. America, Britain, Spain, Ireland, Portugal, [...]

  • Kool-Aid
    An unhealthy divide has formed over the fate of Canadian real estate. And somebody’s going to be terribly wrong. On one side are the apologists you’d expect – realtors, developers, mortgage lenders and (of course) CMHC. On the other is a growing cadre of economists, global analysts, academics and (of course) the social misfits, basement [...]