Are we in a housing boom? housing slump? or housing recovery?
by Julie Broad
 A couple of days ago my Twitter feed was alive with talk of several real estate related subjects that caught my
attention:
- Confirmation of Canada's Housing Bubble
- Record home sales are forecasted for 2010 in Canada
- New Mortgage rules forcing non-owner occupied properties to have 20% down, refinancing your homes to a max
of 90% of value and other regulations aimed squarely at cooling a hot condo market
- Affordability of Vancouver homes have hit at an all time low.
Of course these headlines all hit at the same time as the headlines in the US are declaring massive foreclosures
are still to come in many states and stats from Q4 2009 were announced that one in five homeowners in the US are
underwater.
I don't know about you but it can be really hard to tell what is going on. And frankly, the
national numbers really mean nothing for real estate investors. It's what is going on in the backyard of your
investment areas that matters. But how do you tell if your area is booming, slumping or recovering?
That's where Kieran Trass, author of
The Housing Bubble comes in.
 This book is going to go on my "Must Read" books for all
real estate investors - no matter what country in the world you're in - because he has spent 20 years
studying real estate cycles around the world. And while I do understand the fundamentals of what makes a
good market to buy in and I have for years, his book made things absolutely crystal clear for me. I could see
through the fog before, but now the fog has lifted.
The big difference comes in understanding what is actually DRIVING the market versus what is INFLUENCING it. And
the thing I've always inherently known but never clearly understood is that the media headlines are almost always
based on the things that INFLUENCE the market not the things that drive it.
The influential factors are more sensational. Not too many media outlets are going to be excited to report that the
population of an area increased by 8% for the third year in a row. It's just not interesting or exciting. But they
are going to jump all over any suggestions that a new harmonized tax is going to destroy the new home real estate
industry, or that banks aren't going to be lending money to anybody because of the tightening of rules, or that
consumer confidence in house prices is at an all time high or an all time low.
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