On Thursday, August 5, 2010 from 5 PM to 8 PM at the Stonebridge Hotel, Atrium Room
The Engineering Department of the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo will be holding an open house to provide information about these upcoming projects scheduled to occur in the Lower Townsite.
• Franklin Avenue Revitalization
• Franklin Avenue - Highway 63 Interface
• Lower Townsite West Loop Road - Hardin Street Utilities Upgrading
• Water Supply Line from Water Treatment Plant to Kind Street Booster
This is a public open house and everyone is welcome to attend and learn more about these projects.
If you require any additional information regarding the open house please contact:
Jennifer Johnson, Advisor of Media and Public Relations, 780-788-4364 or email jennifer.johnson@woodbuffalo.ab.ca
Housing starts are expected to improve throughout the Prairie provinces over the next 2 years, including in the Wood Buffalo region.
One of the reason for this is the increase in oil prices and the overall improvement of the economy.
Wood Buffalo is expected to have 1300 housing starts in 2010
The Federal Competition Bureau is looking into whether the Canadian Real Estate Association is being anti-competitive by making it harder for discount brokerages to operate. Earlier this month, the bureau hit the Ottawa-based organization with a court order requesting extensive records about how it and related boards operate. CREA has 85,000 members and represents the majority of realtors across Canada. Federal court records obtained by the Toronto Star allege CREA has been limiting the access of potential competitors in the residential real estate industry to the Multiple Listing Service, or MLS, database. MLS is a members-only computerized database responsible for about 90 per cent of all home sales in Canada. Last year, CREA's board proposed a series of changes to protect the MLS trademark. One proposed that agents could no longer `merely post' properties on the MLS unless they represented the seller for the term of the contract. Another prohibited the seller's name from appearing on www.mls.ca.
R-B-C Economics says Canada's housing affordability continues to erode as prices rise, especially in Alberta and B-C. But it says Central Canada's housing market is cooling. The Royal Bank division says in the third quarter, Alberta and British Columbia had the sharpest erosions in affordability, driven largely by double-digit annual price gains. However, it says, Alberta's soaring price gains still leave the province below past affordability stress points. R-B-C says housing in Calgary and Edmonton remains more affordable than in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, relative to incomes. R-B-C's Derek Holt says faster growth in house prices, the weakest annual growth in household incomes since the first quarter of 2005 and slightly higher interest rates have all combined to erode housing affordability in Canada. The R-B-C Affordability Index measures the proportion of pre-tax household income needed to service the costs of owning a home. The higher the index, the more costly it is to afford a home.
We saw an increase in housing starts in May of this year compared to last year, however housing starts are still down when compared to 2005 on the whole.
There was a 43 percent increase in single family housing starts last month compared to May of '05. There was also 25 multi family housing starts last month, compared to just six in 2005.
For the entire year however starts remain down from 2005 roughly 15 percent, but we are now heading into the summer building season.
