High-lights (or low lights) that effected Real

So 2015 has gone by and many breathe a sigh of relief with hopes that 2016 will shine a little brighter. Just re-capping, here are some of the high-lights (or low lights) that effected Real Estate here in Edmonton over this past year. The price of oil had started to dip late 2014 and while it was nothing compared to the last peak-bust that Edmontonians went through 7 years ago, it did make many nervous speculators out there wonder if they were in for a repeat experience. One trouble with reading bad news articles in the media is that they do have a way of becoming self fulfilling. Now that we have had a full year of bad news related to low oil prices and we have a full year of Real Estate sales data to correlate to, we can see that both sales and prices held up for 2015. If you believe everything you read in the paper then you would think I have my facts wrong, but quite clearly I have my facts right. To shed some light on this apparent discrepancy you need to know exactly what is being compared and you really need to see the full picture. The media do not have your best interests in mind when they write their stories as bad news will sell far more papers than good news ever has, so they look for ways to make it fit what they want. Comparing the number of sales or prices to a very strong year (2014) then of course it will appear that prices have gone down and sales are falling off and it can all be attributed the the drop in oil prices and what ever else they want to blame. Real Estate is long term and you may have heard the 7 year cycle, so if you compare 7 years worth of data then 2015 is actually right on track and 2014 was more like a bubble. Along with the drop in oil prices, there were many stories of people loosing their jobs, and its true. Many people did loose their jobs in the oil industry sector. Its also true but not very publicized, but many people also got re-hired (albeit at lower wages as oil companies renegotiated contracts). Another factor at play that has yet to be determined what effect it is having, is the election of the NDP in the recent provincial election. It was a huge landslide victory for the NDP, overturning the previous PC government which had been in power for 40 years but after the smoke cleared there seemed to be an air of remorse going around and I did hear of some commercial projects which were cancelled due to this. Later in the year, the Chinese devalued their currency and there was a huge Chinese stock market sell off which had repercussions throughout the world almost immediately, effecting not only stock markets, but commodities (yes oil went lower) manufacturing sectors and also into Real Estate here in Canada. There were many other events happening in the world such as the Paris bombing but these don’t appear to have an effect on Real Estate here so we will gloss over it. Now as we are heading into 2016 the focus is still on the low oil price and having just come from the 2016 Housing Forecast, the word is “Lower for Longer”. While that may not be good news if you are planning to sell your house this year, for investors this is the time to start buying.