Tag Archives: First Quarter

Manitoba’s Housing Affordability Remains Steady Amid Sound Market Conditions: Rbc Economics

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Manitoba’s housing market continued on the straight and narrow in the early part of 2011, according to the latest Housing Trends and Affordability report released today by RBC Economics. Housing affordability remains attractive in the province, with little change registered in the first quarter.

“Mounting homebuyer demand continued to be met with an equal-sized increase in homes being put out for sale,” said Robert Hogue, senior economist, RBC. “This sense of balance across Manitoba kept property value appreciation under control.”

The RBC report indicates that home prices changed little in the first quarter. Prices rose modestly for detached bungalows and two-storey homes, while edging lower for condominium apartments (following a sizeable gain in the previous quarter).

The RBC housing affordability measures for Manitoba, which capture the province’s proportion of pre-tax household income needed to service the cost of owning a home, were mixed in the first quarter of 2011 (an increase in measure means that owning a home is less affordable). The measure for the benchmark detached bungalow rose by 0.1 of a percentage point to 34.1 per cent and declined by 0.2 of a percentage point for condominium apartments to 20.3 per cent. The measure remained even for two-storey homes at 36.8 per cent.

“Manitoba is still one of only two provincial markets in Canada, along with Alberta, where measures have remained below long-term averages for all housing categories that we track,” added Hogue.

The majority of Canadian markets experienced weakened affordability in the first quarter of 2011. Most notable was the sizeable deterioration in British Columbia. More specifically, Vancouver saw significant gains in property values, which drove the already elevated cost of homeownership even higher. Quebec’s homebuyers also faced noticeable rises in ownership costs, while those in Atlantic Canada saw their affordability advantage somewhat diminish. The picture remained mixed in other areas of the country, with Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan experiencing ups and downs in ownership costs, depending on the housing type.

“Despite the latest erosion in affordability, provincial levels generally continue to stand near their long-term averages, suggesting that owning a home remains affordable or, at worst, slightly unaffordable across Canada – with Vancouver being a notable exception,” said Hogue.

RBC’s housing affordability measure for a detached bungalow in
Canada’s largest cities is as follows: Vancouver 72.1 per cent (up 3.4 percentage points from the last quarter), Toronto 47.5 per cent (up 0.8 of a percentage point), Montreal 43.1 per cent (up 2.0 percentage points), Ottawa 39.0 per cent (up 0.4 of a percentage point), Calgary 35.9 per cent (up 0.9 of a percentage point) andEdmonton 31.5 per cent (up 0.5 of a percentage point).

http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/May2011/20/c6373.html

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CREA alters early 2011 housing forecast

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Housing sales in Canada is expected to be much better than what have been speculated before. This is because of the increasing consumer confidence that will partially offset the awaited deferment of interest rate hikes, this is how the Canadian Real Estate Association sees it.

CREA had earlier predicted that the national average home price in 2011 would fall by 1.3 per cent from last year to $326,000. This is contrary to what they have recently released that there will be 439,900 existing homes sold in 2011, down 1.6 per cent from 2010, but better than the nine per cent decline that CREA had forecast at the end of last year. Recent reports on building permits and housing starts are two indicators why the change in forecast has been made.

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. reported Tuesday that the pace of new-home construction in Canada increased slightly last month, rising to 170,400 units, up from 169,000 in December on a seasonally adjusted annual rate. That puts the country on a pace for about 10 per cent fewer housing starts than last year.

A moderation in housing starts is a sign that supply is contracting in line with reduced demand, which could avoid an unhealthy glut of available houses on the market if demand declines when interest rate hikes are announced.

CREA predicted Tuesday that some sales that would have been made later in the year will likely occur in the first quarter, as a result of the new rules. A previous change in mortgage rules last year contributed to extremely strong first-quarter demand as buyers sought to beat the deadline.

“This is expected to produce a milder version of the volatility in sales activity that we saw last year which resulted from additional transitory factors,” said CREA’s chief economist Gregory Klump.

Last year, sales were also pushed ahead to the first part of the year as buyers in two provinces — British Columbia and Ontario — rushed to avoid a switch to the harmonized sales tax on July 1.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2011/02/08/crea-forecast-2011.html#ixzz1Djy9l7Fy
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Overall Predictions Civic Tax Rolls Revenues

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As Pennsylvania heads into the second half of its fiscal year, expectations of a slowing economy don’t have the state’s top tax collector seeing a rosy future for revenues.

“We need to be cautious as we go into this budget season of doing things with the assumption this is a rosy picture,” Department of Revenue Secretary Tom Wolf said Thursday as he discussed the state’s revenue and the outlook for 2008.

That doesn’t mean Wolf is seeing red, either.

State revenues in December came above last year’s estimates, but Wolf said those numbers don’t necessarily mean the state has experienced or will continue to see significant gains over last year.

Wolf stressed that revenue projections, used by the Legislature and the Rendell administration to come up with the budget, are produced using objective numbers, but it’s still a process that relies on looking backward and is anything but exact.

With talk of a possible recession in 2008, Wolf said trying to pin down where the state will be financially 18 months from now is dicey.

“When you try to predict a change — and inflection point — you run into a real problem,” Wolf said.

Even with the standard definition of a recession — two or more consecutive quarters with negative growth in the gross domestic product — not yet met, Wolf said the state’s data indicate a 1.1 percentage point growth in the GDP for the fourth quarter of 2007 and forecast the first quarter of this year to be 0.6 percent.

The state’s personal income tax revenues to date are described by Wolf as flat, and its take from sales and use taxes —numbers that won’t be in until later this month — are expected to be sluggish. Wolf also said the realty transfer tax take is down as well.

Wolf’s assessment of the state’s revenue comes a day after House Republicans unveiled two bills to lower the personal income tax.

House Bill 1641 would drop the rate from 3.07 percent to 2.99 percent, and House Bill 1092 would drop it to 2.93 percent in the first year and to 2.8 percent in the second year.

Cutting taxes is one way to spur a slow economy because it puts money back in people’s pockets, said Nate Benefield, director of policy research for the Commonwealth Foundation, a nonpartisan Pennsylvania think tank.

Benefield said revenue projections are always a little bit off, although during the past several years, Pennsylvania’s projections have involved growth with revenues coming in above expectations.

Benefield said although Pennsylvania’s economy is growing slowly, it still lags behind the rest of the country.

“The economy is growing, although it could be doing a lot better than the national average,” Benefield said.

Whether or not a recession will hit is like trying to predict a long winter, he said.

Daniel DiLeo, Penn State-Altoona professor of political science, said if the revenue outlook does become bleak, it could effect the state’s largest expenditures, such as education and Medicaid.

http://www.altoonamirror.com/page/content.detail/id/503526.html?nav=742

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