Vancouver Is Second-Costliest Housing Market

Vancouver displaced Sydney as the least-affordable housing market after Hong Kong among large English-speaking cities, as home pricesrose faster than incomes, a study of 325 metropolitan areas worldwide showed.

Vancouver’s median home price of C$678,000 ($686,400) in the third quarter was 10.6 times its median pretax household income of C$63,800, making the city “severely unaffordable,” Demographia said in a report today. A ratio of 3 or less is considered “affordable,” according to the public-policy firm’s survey of markets in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the U.K., the U.S., Canada and Hong Kong.

Sydney’s ratio of median home price to income was 9.2, while Hong Kong’s was 12.6, a record for the eight-year-old survey, surpassing the previous high of 11.5 for Los Angeles in 2007. Home prices in Hong Kong, Vancouver and Sydney haven’t plunged as they have elsewhere, such as in Ireland, now the second most-affordable country, after the U.S., the study said.

“Housing affordability generally improved in the surveyed nations, though the most unaffordable markets, Hong Kong and Vancouver, became even more unaffordable,” wrote Wendell Cox, principal of Belleville, Illinois-based Demographia, and Hugh Pavletich, managing director of Pavletich Properties Ltd., a commercial developer and investment company in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Policies limiting lots available for construction drove up land prices, putting homes out of reach for middle-class buyers and younger workers in cities such as Vancouver and Sydney, the researchers said. The median price of a detached house in metropolitan Vancouver reached a record C$900,000 in April 2011, according to the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver.

‘Massively Deteriorating’

“The causes of massively deteriorating housing affordability are not a mystery,” Cox and Pavletich said. “They inevitably result from more restrictive land-use regulations adopted by governments with insufficient attention to economic fundamentals.”

The study focuses on the home-affordability ratio, not absolute prices. It doesn’t take into account such influences as falling interest rates, an influx of foreign buyers or the attractions of climate and coastal location.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-22/vancouver-displaces-sydney-as-second-costliest-housing-market.html

Paper and Physical Silver Prices Are Not Decoupling Yet

The good news for silver noobs just starting to get interested in the precious metals and educating themselves (yes, I use that term loosely) online is that there are easy ways to tell which sources have an idea what they are talking about, and which sources are just spouting the same crap that they heard others spout, joining in the groupthink, and living in the land where anyone who doubts that silver is going to $200/ oz in short order is a bankster shill cartel manipulator.   You just have to know what to look for.

One such example of this nonsense is the claim that “paper prices and physical prices are decoupling.”   They’re not.  They haven’t been decoupling, we’ve covered this before, and they’re still not.  I just wanted to write another post on this because with the Sprott Physical Silver Trust secondary offering, we have another concrete example of the NON-divergence of “physical” and “paper” prices.

So let’s completely ignore the fact that Eric Sprott himself told you “we can buy silver, basically, at spot,”  after all, that was last year – maybe things have changed?  No – let’s go to the math.  Remember yesterday’s post when I explained how you can approximate the new NAV of PSLV before it was posted on the website?  Well, now that the website has updated data, we can do even better – we can calculate the price per ounce $PSLV paid for its silver.
Let’s look at the before and after (the secondary offering, that is) snapshots of the Trust.  Before:

http://kiddynamitesworld.com/paper-and-physical-silver-prices-are-not-decoupling-yet/#comment-415765312