Investing $125 in a CD before you buy a new home could pay off in the long run.
The CD contains an interactive course that explains how houses are made and what goes in to them. The course, Technical Aspects of Selling New Homes, is produced by the Professional Home Builders Institute of Alberta.
“How many of you in this room know there are eight issues in how to pick carpet?” executive director Pat Almond asked at the CD’s recent launch.
Topics covered include blueprints, plot plans, structural issues, mechanical aspects and kitchens.
The course takes about 10 hours for people with industry experience and 16 for the general public. Industry personnel can write an exam on the course for a further $125 fee. Real estate agents can gain 18 continuing education credits from the Real Estate Council of Alberta by passing the exam. The general public wouldn’t need to write the exam to benefit.
Almond says the home-builders’ institute has been delivering six classroom courses since 1993. The courses take four days of study in major centres and cost $399.
The CD-ROM course is available to anyone with a computer and counts toward new home sales certification. Exam locations run from Lloydminster’s Lakeland College to Medicine Hat College, so no one should be more than 50 minutes from an exam centre, Almond notes.
Production for the CD was funded by the Alberta Real Estate Foundation, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., the five local home builders’ associations around the province and the Alberta New Home Warranty Program.
Real estate agent Anna Zajac recommends the course. “It allowed me to do it on my own time, starting and stopping as needed. And I didn’t have to take time off work,” she says.
Real estate agents will benefit from the product knowledge, and customers should be more confident when their agent takes them to a new-home salesperson, Zajac adds.
Calgary’s real estate market is looking stable for the fourth quarter, says a real estate executive.
Alberta has a good economy, and the oil and gas sector remains strong, says Tod Hughes, managing partner at Avison Young Commercial Real Estate, even with a slowdown in the general economic picture.
In some ways, the city benefits from negative economic news elsewhere. Calgary and Toronto have become the places where investors look, Hughes says.
Calgary isn’t seeing a lot of subleasing activity due to the economic slowdown or the high-tech crunch, says Mike Gigliuk, research director for CB Richard Ellis Alberta Ltd. (CBRE).
There is sublease activity in the downtown core, mostly because of mergers and acquisitions in the oilpatch.
Even downtown, sublease space is expected to rise in the fourth quarter after falling by 100,000 sq. ft. in the third quarter, CBRE’s figures show.
The Calgary office market absorbed 225,200 sq. ft. of space in the third quarter.
The strong oil and gas sector is behind the strength of the commercial real estate market. The city is still the best commercial real estate market in Canada, says CBRE.
Moody’s Investors Service said Montreal had the strongest commercial real estate market in the first two quarters, scoring 85 out of 100 on its assessment.
Moody’s said the supply-demand balance favours building owners in all nine major Canadian markets.
The rating agency gave the Vancouver real estate market an 84 and Edmonton an 83. Regina and Toronto tied at 82, while Winnipeg and Calgary tied at 81. Ottawa was given a 79 and Halifax a 71.
Even if Canada were to experience a recession, says Moody’s, the commercial real estate markets would have a better cushion than most U.S. markets.
