The Fight For Sold Data + Housing Market Stabilizes

In the City: Home prices rise as the housing market stabilizes following a turbulent year.

Elsewhere: The Vancouver real estate market is starting to look like a disaster, the Starbucks factor in neighborhoods and the impact of Airbnb.

Toronto

Home prices rise against tighter supply in August (Toronto Star)

August appears to have cemented the Toronto region’s real estate recovery, with average resale home prices up 4.7 per cent year over year to $765,270, including single-family homes and highrise apartments. That is about $34,000 higher than the average a year ago.

Toronto's housing market stabilizes after turbulent year as sales rise, prices steady (Bloomberg)

“Many home buyers who had initially moved to the sidelines due to the Ontario Fair Housing Plan and new mortgage lending guidelines have renewed their search for a home and are getting deals done much more so than last year,” Garry Bhaura, president at the housing board, said in a statement.

Why I Fought for Sold Data - and Why The Fight is Not Over (Move Smartly)

Since the dawn of the internet & data age, TREB’s main strategy has been to stall: unlike travel agents, clothing retailers and taxi drivers, real estate agents are never going to have to change. Now, I appreciate that it is hard to guide members through the data age - agents and brokerages are facing incredible pressures to change how they do business in a very short amount of time and some are already suffering.

TREB presses brokers on data protection (The Globe and Mail)

After a Supreme Court ruling, the war for control of Toronto real estate data should be over. But the victorious Competition Bureau, the defeated Toronto Real Estate Board and even many of the board’s own members remain at odds on a number of legal and technical details.

How to remake Toronto’s old neighbourhoods: low but dense (The Globe)

It’s got a brick façade. It has a sloped roof. And it has space for five families – in comfortable spaces – instead of two narrow houses. This is what the future of Toronto’s house neighbourhoods could look like.

Canada

Vancouver Real Estate Is Starting To Look Like A Disaster (Huffington Post)

There's no papering over the latest bad news from the region's real estate board: Sales in August were down 36.6 per cent from the same month a year earlier, the region's real estate board reported Wednesday, and prices are now falling in all housing categories.

Canadian Real Estate Business Risks Stagnating In The Data Stone Age (Huffington Post)

"There has been no public pressure here to release home sale prices," the head of the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board said. (However, as the Citizen noted, some websites are defying the real estate boards and publishing the data anyway.)

'Everybody fits in': inside the Canadian cities where minorities are the majority (The Guardian)

Inside the Foody Mart, there are shelves of salted duck eggs, air-shipped mangosteen and durian. Staff hand out samples of fish balls and regulars drinkbubble tea alongside young families enjoying hot meals from the takeaway counter, as Shanghai pop plays over the speakers.

USA

After a Starbucks opens in town, housing prices tend to rise, Harvard study finds (CNBC)

"The most natural hypothesis to us is that restaurants respond to exogenous changes in neighborhood composition, not that restaurant availability is driving neighborhood change," the paper concludes.

Can Exchange Programs Help Bridge the Urban-Rural Divide? (City Lab)

Actor Emily Stewart, a past participant who has lived across Kentucky, said, “There’s a lot more diversity, and a lot more that unites us, throughout the state than what you realize before you do the program. You really begin to understand the history, heritage, and family you’re a part of by being a Kentuckian.”

Albany Is a Mess. Grab a Broom. (New York Times)

Across the state, the needs of New Yorkers, from subways to affordable housing, are subverted by powerful interests in a culture rife with ethical rot and outright corruption. Fixing this perverse political culture demands that people show up to the polls on Sept. 13 and remind Albany that it works for them.

The financial crisis was a devastating failure of the free market that followed a period of rising inequality within many countries. Yet, contrary to what happened in the 1970s, policymakers have barely questioned the relative roles of government and markets.