We have discussed the ongoing trend of price declines in the Canadian real estate market at length here, and there’s likely no need to go on about them any further. There are all sorts of factors that have gone into this, but the overarching and ultimately connected one is that all the ones that fuelled the overheated real estate market over the past decade and longer are now gone for the most part. Demand is the exception to that, and ongoing and growing demand is THE reason why median home prices in Canada haven’t gone lower than they have so far.

Nonetheless, prices are down and that has put something of a chill on the industry and there’s also no debating the fact that there is inventory that is not on the market that would be if prices were where they were at this time in 2021. The more of a buyer’s market that is created when prices go down is tempered a bit by this fact; fewer homes being on the market tends to protect the averages they end up selling for.

All of this leads to our discussion for this week’s blog entry here, and specifically with the way that some industry experts believe that real estate price declines may still benefit home sellers. Whether that is new that’s encouraging enough to persuade anyone to put a home on the market when they’ve been hesitant to do so remains to be seen, but one thing we do know is that our online real estate lead generation system here at Real Estate Leads is an excellent resource for an realtor who finds that new clientele are more scarce nowadays.

Let’s look at why some real estate insiders have this belief, and what’s backing it up for them.

Evaluating Balance

The Canadian real estate market is going through an adjustment period right now and Canadian housing markets from coast to coast are returning to equilibrium. This is attributable to the Bank of Canada (BoC) raising interest rates and lifting mortgage rates along with them accordingly. The uncertainty in the housing market and the broader economy adds to this, and then there’s the fact that many households have exhausted their pandemic-era savings while inflation has eaten away at their purchasing power in a significant way.

According to the REMAX Canadian Housing Market Outlook for 2023 around 55% of housing markets in Canada will return to balance or even become a buyer’s market this year. This should mean a 3.3% slide in the average home price for 2023, and so far at the quarter mark that looks like a fairly accurate prediction. Of course that is going to benefit buyers, but could it benefit sellers too? It seems that it may.

A balanced market is when the supply of residential properties meets the level of demand. A buyer’s market is when there is a greater inventory of homes than the number of buyers. This type of climate means that buyers have more leverage and may be able to negotiate prices and homes may sit unsold longer than expected along with possible need to lower prices from the initial asking one.

So what part of ANY of that would be good for sellers?

Location, Subsequent Purchase Factors, and More

For starters, location can play a big role. The number may be be higher or lower depending on where you are located. Someone selling a single-family home or townhouse in Calgary or a similar market is going to like the sound of a sale price that is expected to rise 7% over the course of 2023. If you are listing your home for sale in the Ottawa real estate market you may benefit from an expected 4% rise. Plus the national outlook of -3.3% is lower than what was seen for 2022, meaning that the downturn or correction may have already peaked.

Another consideration is that clients who are selling a home will also need another place to reside in once the transaction is completed. By taking the equity and purchasing another residence, they will be avoiding the frenzy and panic of a seller’s market. Sellers can also see the way a near-balanced market means you they don’t need to give away their home for anything along the lines of 20% discount or whatever similar number anyone will suggest as reasonable given the housing market downturn.

Keep in mind there is still demand for housing and with interest rates increases being paused by the BoC as officially stated, home buying is expected to pick up again. Add the immigration factor and the competition for real estate in Canada will be buoyed yet again.

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Any suggestion that their enthusiasm for investing in real estate has waned for Canadians has been disproven with a recent report from the Mustel Institute and Sotheby’s real estate. Made available just over a week ago, it comes with results that indicate that as long as Canadians can afford to invest in real estate they will do it the majority of the time. Despite a cooled market and industry predictions that the market will continue to be be down well into 2024 at the earliest, the predominant belief is that the long-term performance of real estate as an investment asset is more than good enough to assume any risk in making those investments.

The basics of such a deduction are pretty straightforward; demands is far outstripping supply, population growth continues at record rates, and urbanization trends around the world are seen the same way as they are in other countries around the world. Do this mean investing in metro city real estate is the better choice. Absolutely it is IF that’s what you can afford to do and you can be in a position to be patient and wait out any other storms that we might not know are on the horizon. There are plenty of good reasons why new condominium development pre-sales are dominated by investment buyers in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and Calgary.

This will be as good a news as any to realtors who may be light on new clientele but have a reason to believe that things will be turning around and folks looking to buy or sell homes are going to be more involved in the market than they have been since things really turned down about a year ago from now. The same piece of advice regarding that applies here too, and that is that our online real estate lead generation system here at Real Estate Leads is an excellent resource for improving you odds with finding and retaining new clients.

Let’s have a look in greater detail at this report that suggest Canadian won’t have much hesitation if any with investing in real estate.

Still Solid Investment

The report surveyed 2,000 Canadians between the ages of 18 and 77 years old in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal. Of them 49% feel that a home or residential real estate purchase will perform the same or better than their other financial investments in the next year. That belief goes up to 60% when looking 10 years ahead, and one in 3 urban Canadians is going to be more inclined to buy a home in the next 5 years than they would have been any time from January 2020 until now. That works out to 35% of respondents.

Another 35% of them were individuals or couples who already own a home and see themselves as more likely to sell within the next 5 years as compared to how the y felt about the same decision before the pandemic.

The age demographic group that had the most optimism about performance was the one that so many people who can’t afford homes take issue with – the Baby Boomers, who are people well into retirement and their senior years now and many of whom who have seen meteoritic gains on homes they bought 40 or more years ago for very favorable prices.

Among all metropolitan areas, just under one-third of Baby Boomers believe that real estate will outperform their financial investments in a year, For urban Canadians in general and of no specific demographic that number is 23%, so it’s not a huge difference and suggests generally that people are keen to invest in real estate and continue to be that way.

Around 60% of urban Canadians across the generations expressed their belief that they’ll see similar or even better performance from a home or residential real estate purchase in the next 10 years. Of these folks it is 35% of them who foresee it outperforming them in that time and 24% who see that investment coming back intact at the very least. The report also suggests that 44% of urbanite baby boomers are more predominantly inclined to believe that real estate will outperform their other financial investments within that same next decade. 21% believe performance will be the same.

Some More Likely to Sell

Apparently the pandemic has had the least sway on Generation X and Baby Boomers’ likelihood to buy or sell. Somewhere between 4 and 5 of every 10 of either demographic group report no change in what they see as their likelihood to buy compared to January 2020. Millennials are a different story, as over the next 5 years they are now less likely than Generation X and Baby Boomers to sell their primary home compared to pre-pandemic.

It was 32% that reported a reduced propensity to sell for this group, compared to 21 and 23% for Generation X and Baby Boomers respectively.

Overall, the role of interest rates, inflationary pressures and economic uncertainty haven’t majorly detracted from the confidence in the long-term financial performance of residential real estate. The Canadian real estate market remains an attractive asset class for investors across all generations.

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It’s been stated a thousand times over that real estate is very likely NOT going to be anyone’s means of getting rich quickly and easily. You will have a hard time finding any realtor who will tell you otherwise, and that will be true of even the wealthiest and most successful realtors. The quickly part of it may be truer, but it is never going to be easy and first and foremost you have to remember that this is a VERY competitive business. And becoming more competitive all the time, as will always be the case.

We usually focus on market dynamics and housing outlooks in Canada with our blog entries here, but from time to time we do like to switch over to real estate practice topics and what realtors can do to either provide better service for their clients or expand on their own knowledge of how they can do better for themselves in their chosen profession. That’s what we’re going to do here this week and look at something called Robotic Process Automation.

And it will likely be well received, as realtors are always looking at ways to gain competitive advantages based on what we talked about earlier with regard to a competitive business and industry. Realtors who are newer to the business and not drumming up the volume of clientele they’d like to be can take advantage of our online real estate lead generation service here at Real Estate Leads. It is an excellent way to get more out of your client prospecting efforts, and it certainly is a way to make at least one part of your work easier.

Let’s now look into what RPA is and how you can incorporate automation into your work as a real estate agent in Canada for better results.

Smart Moves

Many real estate professionals don’t have the time for strategic, social and creative tasks, or they at least don’t have enough time for them. But now modern technologies offer various opportunities to streamline or even fully automate manual tasks that were up until now very time consuming. So here we are now with RPA (robotic process automation) becoming one of the most popular and accessible solutions for real estate agents.

All of this is centered around the technology landscape in real estate where real estate operations haven’t changed much over the last few years despite all the digitalization occurring in business of all sorts and seen prominently in many other sectors. Many real estate companies still use spreadsheets when collecting and analyzing data for property evaluation, invoices, lease administration, and so on.

Many realtors are hesitant to lean too heavily on technology because they believe that the interpersonal relations aspect of the way they work with clients is a very essential part of their success, and there is 100% merit to that way of thinking and if you feel that way you shouldn’t abandon that way of thinking

But here is how real estate agents can leverage RPA

Handling Administrative Tasks Reliably

With RPA software robots are deployed and programmed to mimic typical human actions and handle a wide range of repetitive administrative tasks. The business operations best suited to RPA automation in real estate involve the entry and processing of huge amounts of data with compliance, report generation, client account setup, tenant credit processing, invoicing, contract entry, maintenance scheduling, bank reconciliation, and supplier management among other operations needs that a realtor may need to be responsible for.

The cost savings that can be realized by investing in robotic process automation of such processes can be impressive. For companies the estimates are that 45% of them utilizing RPA approaches had cost savings of 10 to 20% , while 27% were even aiming for savings of 20 to 40%. As a realtor working independently in business you can expect to have similar positive gains from using RPA in your operations.

RPA implementation for realtors can also provide significant time savings. There was a story of a leading investment services company in Saudi Arabia that lowered its transaction processing time by 66% after deploying software robots to automate business-critical operations. That can give you an idea of what’s possible for anyone who’s business is conducting investment in real estate, which is what you do for your clients as a real estate agent in Canada.

Ideal Tasks for Automation

For an RPA solution to prove the most effective and generate maximum return, it should be applied to the most suitable business process. As a result realtors and / or real estate companies choosing to use it should be evaluative with their options and choose to prioritize ones with the highest potential value. You may also want to consider automating high-volume tedious tasks that can be streamlined even more in the future using bots’ exceptional scalability.

Process optimization will be important too, and especially for real estate companies that will have more of a need to improve RPA logic and solve all inefficiencies.

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Sign up with Real Estate Leads here and immediately put yourself in position to take advantage of the technology here that lets realtors be first-in-touch with prospective new clients who have indicated their readiness with buying or selling a home. And that is buying or selling a home in the area of the country where you are working as a real estate agent. You’ll have an advanced opportunity to contact them and then showcase yourself as the local real estate professional they need on their side to get them the best value for the home they’re buying , or the best marketing of the home they’re selling.

Real estate isn’t limited to residential where the commodity is homes for people to live in. Commercial real estate is an equal part of the picture and there are some real estate agents who also work in this sphere as well, and most commonly working with clients who are not leasing commercial space for their business but rather investors who are buying commercial real estate with an eye to making it available through Collier’s or another well-known commercial real estate company.

And at a time when Canadian residential real estate sales are in a lull when looked at nationwide, the same cannot be said for commercial real estate in Canada. The demand for it has certainly never been higher, and the one the characteristic it does share with residential is that the supply of it is is nowhere near matching the demand. New building starts for commercial real estate are actually outpacing residential in some areas of the country, but that’s not a bad thing when you consider is that industry is essential to strong local economies.

It may be at a time like this that some realtors may want to expand their horizons and look to branch into commercial real estate, but for those who feel their expertise is best provided for homebuyers and home sellers there are options if you need to see better results from your efforts to drum up new clients. To that end our online real estate lead generation system here at Real Estate Leads is an excellent resource and comes highly recommended from other profit and growth-minded realtors.

Back to topic, we’ll use this week’s entry to look at why the sales projections for commercial real estate in Canada are so rosy for the remainder of the year.

Nice Soft Landing

The consensus has been that the outlook for commercial real estate looks bumpy in the near term, but it goes along with a similar one that predicts it might still play out with a nice soft landing. The Canada Real Estate Market Outlook report came out a little less than 2 weeks ago, and it predicts challenges with tougher financing conditions and a potential economic slowdown that will detract from investment.

One to two quarters of slowed investment before activity rebounds in Q3 is being predicted, and over the longer term it is foreseen that large investors will be targeting commercial real estate with gusto and that more certainty for interest rates should also be a big plus or the industry.

All of this cumulates with commercial real estate investment in Canada possibly reaching an all-time high of $59.3 billion this year, and this will be primarily fuelled by greater merger and acquisitions activity. Commercial real estate investment totalled $58.5 billion in 2022, and this number was just slightly below the record volume set in 2021. One that should be bested this year if these predictions are accurate.

The BoC’s decision to pause interest rates at 4.5% while it weighs their effect on the economy should allow pricing expectations to recalibrate as we progress through the remainder of 2023. Q3 and Q4 should see much more robust investment activity.

Role of Office Vacancies

Office vacancy continues to increase, and demand for older space is now being replaced by interest in more modern locations and facilities. It has been extensively reported on with how influencing workers back to the office will be a priority in 2023. Tenants will use the coming year to relocate to properties with the best amenities, commute times and sustainability profiles and then there’s also the way some property owners have considered converting their real estate to residential.

The report touched on the relation to residential real estate briefly too, and noted a growing demand for multi-family rental real estate, with Canada’s overall vacancy rate falling to a 20-year low of 2% in 2022. High demand continuing this year is predicted and this should drive vacancy even lower in 2023.

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Sign up with Real Estate Leads here and receive a monthly quota of qualified, online-generated leads delivered to you and only you for your similarly exclusive area of any city or town of your choosing across Canada. It’s a dynamite way to supercharge your real estate client prospecting efforts, and as we all know – it’s the early bird that always gets the worm!