Media - Fact or Fiction?

You know that you shouldn’t always believe the media, right? That is a mere understatement! Recently in the news the media stated something to the effect that average house prices have decreased in the past month. This caused some people to get upset, worrying that they overpaid for their properties. This is probably not the case (although in the seller’s market we just experienced there are a lot of people who ‘bid’ more than the probably should have just to get a house).

What the media does not tell you is how people come about getting the ‘average house price in Saskatoon’. They do an average, taking all of the properties that sell in a period of time and tally up the gross property value and divide it by the quantity of homes sold. What is neglected to be taken into consideration is the TYPE of residential property sold. Consider this, in one month if 100 houses sell and 75 of those are big new houses in S1 and 25 of those are apartment style condos (still considered residential), the average is going to appear to be extremely high…but in the next month those numbers are reversed and there are more condos selling (which was definitely the case due to the insane shortage of student housing) and only 25 large houses, the average is going to appear to have decreased. In reality, the market has not gone up or down, but the media just caught the tailwind and found out an average price overall.

Moral of the story, don’t always believe what you hear in the news, but we all already knew that, right?

As far as the future of real estate in Saskatoon…well, if I could tell you that for certain and I had a crystal ball, I would have invested all my money a year ago and I would be retired! We all wish we had the answer to that, but keep in mind, Saskatoon has a LOT going for it as a City and a lot more going on around Saskatoon, so we don’t see a decline, but a steady incline however probably nothing like we saw in the spring. Real estate is generally a safe investment in a thriving city like ours.

Kari Calder
Saskatoon Real Estate Agent
Century 21 Conexus Realty Ltd.
www.karicalder.com

This entry was posted on 12. October 2007 at 07:10 and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.