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Comment by smsm42 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I'm getting this right - they got 3.7% drop after 250% raise in 10 years and they consider the problem being fixed and everybody should come and look how cool they are? Something is missing here. OK, let's say they manage to get the local market get lethargic - nobody sells because prices are too low and selling means realizing huge losses, nobody buys because there's nothing to buy. How this is "bringing it under control"? It's like shooting your computer and saying "here, I debugged it! It's no longer crashing!" It's no longer working either...

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You do know that over 10 years that is an annualised 9.6%, a 3.7% drop in a year is a big deal. What do you want, anarchy?

I want to understand what is the great achievement this article is touting.

The actual key figure is that sales dropped 39.5% from last year. Housing prices tend to be inelastic downwards, because nobody wants to sell in a sinking market, but if the trend continues, there will be enough people who have to sell that prices will plummet as well.

It might be under control. I don't think your shooting computer analogy is quite right - the equivalent would be making selling houses illegal.

This is like your computer was constantly restarting, so you unplugged the weird printer. Now it hasn't restarted...yet.

No one in Vancouver is thinking anything is solved.

Except pretty much everyone has a mortgage to get their property. Even the Chinese house buyers, well, most of them.

So house prices drop, so the backstop for the loans doesn't work anymore. Interest rates are rising, so monthly payments are going up.

Let's just say "I hope rents are rising too". Otherwise ...

>nobody sells because prices are too low and selling means realizing huge losses

This is only looking at housing as investment/speculation. Downside is that people also sell if life forces them to. Like if they need to move because of personal or professional reason.

If the price continues to trend downward, realizing a loss isn't as bad as losing more, or more likely unable to deploy capital in better investments. While there are mortgages, my assumption is that foreign money is mostly all cash buyers.

You're interpreting the quartz.com authors opinion, not that of the municipal or provincial government.

from 1984, chapter 5:

It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. .. the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty grammes. Syme, too-in some more complex way, involving doublethink, Syme swallowed it. Was he, then, alone in the possession of a memory? .. http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/4.html

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