Today the Calgary Real Estate Board (CREB) hosted their annual forecast and tradeshow, shedding some light on what the housing market will bring this year. The CREB 2015 Forecast brought some great speakers, including Kevin O’Leary, and lots of insight was shared.
The overall sentiment from the forecast was that the 2015 housing market will bring Calgary to a more balanced state. It is also predicted that interest rates will slowly start to edge up towards the later half of this year.
“I think to be conservative today as entrepreneurs who sell assets that are interest rate sensitive we should think about what’s going to happen here. so if we go and look at previous periods when rates went up and see what occurred, for example in 1999 or 2004, when rate hikes were moving up, yes there was a correction in the market but it wasn’t any more than six per cent and within eight months of completely recovered because generally speaking interest rate hikes are associated with enhanced economic activity and the correlation between assets and enhanced activity and pricing power with corporations and job growth in terms of wage inflation are all correlated together, so what we’re seeing here is an interest rate hike does not do that much damage or hasn’t historically so all the concern about 25, 50 or even 80 basis points in my opinion is not going to have that big an impact on real estate.” — Kevin O’Leary
To read more about CREB’s forecast for this year, check out this special forecast edition of CREB Real Estate News.
