Our Jordan Bateman gives you the heads-up on how Alberta and B.C. will fare economically next year, government transparency grades, and more trouble for Vancouver housing prices.
📉Desjardins has been crunching the numbers, and they are predicting big drops in the B.C. and Alberta economic projections for 2024. B.C. is in dire straits: Desjardins says the economy will contract by 0.1% next year, as B.C.’s forestry and resource industries are coming in far softer than expected. “Consumers in the province remained Canada’s most indebted as of the second quarter. And B.C.’s economy remains highly housing oriented. Employment and retail sales gains continued to lag the national average since our last outlook,” says Desjardins. Alberta is still expected to see 1% growth in 2024 – highest in Canada – but that’s a far cry from the 2.3% it will experience in 2023. “Alberta’s economy still looks well positioned to avoid the worst of the coming Canadian downturn,” says the report.
🤓 The Alberta government received top mark – A+ – from the CD Howe Institute in its annual report card of fiscal accountability among Canadian provinces. “Alberta has been a solid performer since 2015, when it stopped showing multiple balance figures in its budgets. Its timely budget release helped it top the class this year,” said the report. B.C. scored a B-, which sounds okay, except only three provinces scored lower.
🏠 More worrying signs for the Vancouver area real estate market – quick rising interest rates have slowed homebuying, which has in turn slowed developers and builders from assembling land for future projects. New figures, from the national analytics firm Altus Group, show that the number of sales of undeveloped residential land in Greater Vancouver declined in each of the past five quarters, plummeting more than 85 per cent in the third quarter of this year from the second quarter of last year. The value of those land sales dropped to $202 million from $1.43 billion in that time. This means fewer housing starts – not good news in an affordability crisis.
