Jonathan Gabbert is creating a new freeware CYVR for both FS9 and FSX. We’ll work with him to ensure compatibility with Vancouver+. You can follow progress on his blog. Congrats Jonathan on the great work so far …
Wednesday, December 24th, 2008
Monday, December 22nd, 2008
Deals on Ron’s birthday
December 23rd, Ron’s offering 50% off on his fight simulation aircraft products. Details here.
Saturday, December 6th, 2008
Guessing
OK, with the latest Victoria real estate report out at the Victoria Real Estate Board, I’ll make some guesses as to what will happen next with home prices here. And thanks to Tony Joe for a straightforward report this month. (Note that Tony’s reports aren’t archived, so beyond January 1, 2009, you won’t see November’s report anymore.)
Guess #1 – the very low sales/listings ratio, now at 6% (down from a peaks of 46% in March 2005, and nearly 28% in May 2007), will drop a bit in December due to seasonal lethargy, but will not go much lower, if at all, in the new year. Here’s how it has behaved over the last couple of years.
Guess #2 – Home prices will continue to fall, but the actual amount won’t be clear. Although the average sale of single family homes fell by 7% and condos fell 15%, this could be skewed by groups of sales at higher or lower value. Victoria doesn’t compare the price of equivalent properties month to month. Witness townhomes, where the average rose 15% from October to November, but apparently that was skewed by 2 high value properties amongst a small number of sales. Here’s the trend (thousands of dollars) in the six month moving average on condo prices in Victoria. Without the smoothing, the drop from March to November is close to 22%. Percentage change is relative to March.
| Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | |
| Average Price | 339 | 328 | 324 | 320 | 306 | 303 | 295 | 293 | 284 |
| Change in price | 0.0% | -3.2% | -4.4% | -5.6% | -9.7% | -10.6% | -13.0% | -13.6% | -16.2% |
Guess#3 – the economy itself will take a couple of years to transform, and will not stabilize for that time, although it may appear to for short periods. When it does stabilize, the “rules” may be different and/or more variable than they we thought they were now.
Update: per the comment below, Roger points out that he posts statistics on his photoshare site.
