Mainstream Media: Real Estate

Vancouver Dept: There isn't a day that passes without the mainstream media or new media offering at least one story about housing prices or new development projects. The fact that I've been able to sustain a regular column like this for more than a decade and still have many readers who react to what I write twice a month is a testament to the popularity of the topic, according to Vancouver Sun. The lack of hard data and well researched facts leads to a lot of guessing and adopting of assumptions that still need to be proved reliable. There are some questions we even try to avoid addressing altogether, because we have very few factual answers and reliable data to back up those answers. The foreign-ownership issue is one of those that we've avoided having a meaningful discussion about, mainly because we can't really pin down the extent and the effect of foreign ownership with hard facts and we talk a lot about real estaterelated issues in Vancouver. Urban development and the real estate market have been popular topics for casual conversations and weighty public-policy debates since the mid-1980s, when we experienced the first modern-day real estate boom in Vancouver. Sadly, much of the discussion is uninformed. Most opinions are based on anecdotal information rather than facts. Many decisions flow from limited data and less than thorough research. That's because accurate information doesn't exist and it's unfortunate, because the issues that flow from these discussions are issues that not only touch the lives of nearly everyone living in our metropolitan region today; they are also the issues that will largely shape the future of the quality of life for our kids and their kids if they choose to continue living here. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.