Weekly Market Report, Dec. 30/16

Running average definitely not following last year

Next year looks like the Canadian dollar will get crushed and may fall below 62 cents U.S. The fallout will be foreigners not buying Canadian real estate to avoid capital losses on our falling dollar.

Foreigners have a lot more bang for their buck when Loonie goes Peso.

Albeit, it's a pretty Peso already.

Are the 4-week moving price averages weighted equally by week? Or is the relative weight of each week largely determined by the number of sales in that week?

I ask because the movement down in house prices and up in condos seems pretty abrupt for a 4-week moving average and I'm trying to figure out what's going on.

I just take an average of all the sales that were reported in the past 4 weeks. Sales are lower at this time of year so the average does bounce around more.

But if 208 sales dropped off this week and were replaced by 95 sales (with the other 3 weeks remaining constant), that means given the 13k average drop that the 95 sales this week had a price on average $29k less than those in the week of 4 weeks ago. Maybe I'm just a shmuck who is surprised by things I shouldn't be surprised by, but that's a big change even given the seasonality no?

Your comment about a lot of luxury sales on the week of November 25th seems to have been bang on. I think even this week's average drops another ~$10kish over the next month if it turns out that this week wasn't a major anomaly.

I agree w anonymous. The latest week sales seem to skew the price too much.

But if the Canadian currency keeps on falling their property is worthless in their native currency. That means a huge capital loss upon sale.

I'm looking forward to the annual forecast

It could just be a double whammy -- a really good week dropped out and a really crappy week was added. I guess we'll find out more slowly over the next month...