The Royal Bank of Canada just released their latest affordability report covering the first quarter of 2010 and strangely enough, Alberta was the only province to actually show an increase in affordability throughout Canada. Every other province and region actually became slightly less affordable.
Just to clarify, we weren’t talking about double digit increases or decreases, but rather moderate changes, still though great news for Alberta. There really wasn’t to much out of the ordinary in the report, although they did point out that they believe we won’t see any excessive “unaffordability” coming up in the near future. This is due to a projected cooling of the Real Estate market across Canada after an unusually active first quarter.
From my perspective, the market may behave slightly differently in Alberta as we tend to be behind the curve. We didn’t experience the significant surge many of the other provinces did in sales and values during the first quarter, although it wasn’t all that bad here. We are still dealing with concerns about oil prices, the contining saga of low gas prices and the uncertainty in various areas of the energy industry.
As we meander through the rest of 2010, I can still see some real opportunity during the last half of the year for employment stability and easing of pressure on our energy industries. This should lead to more reactionary purchasing to take advantage of interest rates while they are still at low points. Eventually this could contribute to not only values increasing, but also an additional surge in the economy as stability continues to take hold.
If you have a few minutes to read throught he full report, it is available here, http://www.rbc.com/economics/market/pdf/house.pdf
If you have thoughts on what will happen over the next six months, next year or even tomorrow, I would love to hear them!
