CRA and the Province pile in. Numbers of wildly varying relevance and quality flood the press, the blogs, Twitter and every other form of media. What’s one to do?
Garth Turner writes in HuffPost with simple advice for people in Vancouver real estate.
Get out if you can. Now.
Mostly, we should fear human nature. We move in emotional, unthinking herds with trending attitudes that inevitably lead to excess, loss and regret. Economies do not create bubbles. Only people can do that.
Garth, what if I need a place to live?
Rent.
However Garth Turner has been predicting this for so long, I would take it with a grain of salt. The only thing that will bring and end to this insanity is firm action by the federal and provincial government and that just doesn’t seem likely. You are on your own.
Garth Turner has been wrong for many, many years. If I had bought real estate when he was predicting an enormous crash, circa 2008-09, I’d have enormous equity now. Arguably, he will eventually be right; then again, there may not actually be a crash. (Turner is also not a nice person, often insulting and belittling people who ask him legitimate questions.)
I actually read a few of Garth Vader’s books over the years. Fortunately, I never took his advice.
He reminds me of Ratbert – if you’re loud enough some people will pay you attention.
He has feathered his nest very well and has a small stable of portfolio pimps. Imagine him and his sales crew standing around the cash gullible people surrendered for “management”. They are facing the pile doing a circle twerk.
Contrast him with Laurence D. Fink, head of Black Rock, the largest investment firm in the world, with trillions under management who, in April of 2015, said that the best place to invest was in art, and real estate in Vancouver, and a few other cities. You would have made a fortune listening to Laurence.
Garth is ill-mannered, irritable, and incorrect.
Garth the Darth – no. Larry the Fink – you da man.
Garth pushes having a diversified asset base. There’s nothing wrong with that. Fill your TFSA, RRSP and have some financial assets outside of Canada and North America.
His core statement is don’t depend on a single asset appreciating for your retirement, and rent if it’s cheaper. It’s almost always cheaper to rent in Vancouver now.
My rent would take more than 30 years to buy my house. If you subtract maintenance costs and property taxes it’s closer to 40 years of rent. According to him, that means it’s way cheaper to rent than buy my house.
He thinks housing prices in Vancouver were stupid 5 years ago, most people would agree. He think’s we’re destined for a huge correction now, because it hasn’t corrected earlier. That is to be seen, but seems incredibly likely.
None of that seems that controversial unless you’re a person who is in debt up to their eyeballs and you haven’t got any other financial assets.