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(July 17, 2008) Reports of the housing market’s demise may have been premature. According to a new survey conducted by Royal LePage Real Estate Services, housing prices are actually expected to increase by 3.5% by the end of the year.

The survey says Halifax will be the strongest market, with the value of a standard two-story house already increasing by 19.7% over Q2 last year. Still, the survey admits that the rise in housing prices won’t be as great as it was in 2007.

“Pent-up demand is satisfied and some buyers retreat to the sidelines in the face of increasing economic uncertainty,” says a Royal LePage release.

Besides those in Halifax, most of Canada’s home values fared well in the second quarter, with Saskatoon, Regina, Winnipeg and Saint John among the cities that boasted double-digit percentage changes.

The worst-performing cities in the second quarter were Calgary and Edmonton, which saw a 6% and 12.4% drop in standard two-story house prices, respectively.

“Canada’s resale housing market proved resilient in the second quarter. In fact, we have been pleasantly surprised that strong fundamentals, such as enduringly positive employment numbers and reasonable mortgage rates, have countered increasingly pessimistic consumer sentiment, based primarily on the American housing recession,” says Phil Soper, Royal LePage’s president.

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Canadian purchasing power rising: C.D. Howe

(July 17, 2008) Despite all the doom and gloom news about our economy, a new report says Canadians’ real incomes and purchasing power have actually risen.

In a C.D. Howe study titled “Richer Than We Think: Why Canadians’ Purchasing Power Is Up While Economic Growth Is Down,” policy analyst Colin Busby writes that the country has been helped by falling import and robust export prices.

He says the global demand for oil and gas meant historically high export prices, which have only benefited Canadian purchasing power.

Using a measure called “command GDP,” an income measure that gives a rough approximation of the purchasing power increase generated by expensive exports and cheap imports, Busby found that real incomes have grown faster than real GDP.

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Ex-Olympian joins Wellington West

(July 17, 2008) Sometimes a company can use a little star power to boost its profile — in this case Wellington West has hired Marc Albert, the captain of Canada’s 1992 Olympic volleyball team.

Albert will become Wellington’s executive vice-president and COO. He’ll be responsible for the business’s daily operations.

“Marc will be instrumental in helping us continue to build an excellent platform for growth across our financial planning network,” says Wade Lawrence, president of Wellington West.

Previously, Albert worked at Investors Group as vice-president of the company’s Atlantic region.

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CIBC World Markets adopts new management system

(July 17, 2008) CIBC World Markets revealed Thursday that it has upgraded its trading system thanks to the inter-listed Canadian algorithms on the Charles River Investment Management System order management system.

The company is the first Canadian dealer to use the system.

Martin Piszel, CIBC’s managing director of alternative execution services, says the new network will speed up the deployment process and “allow us to make front-end changes that provide mutual clients with instant access to our algorithmic suite.”

(07/17/08)