INDUSTRY STANDARD
I’ve been looking at commercial and residential real estate numbers pretty regularly since 2016. When I was in Calgary at that time and exploring commercial real estate, I kept coming across nonsensical numbers all over the place. As someone new to the city and with no background information the figures were ludicrous. As I started looking into it ("Can that possibly be correct?") I learned a lot, mostly about how rampant and significant the level of fraud seemed to be. Since then, I came to understand this wasn't isolated to Calgary but also exists in Toronto, Hamilton, Saskatoon, Vancouver, and Victoria: everywhere I've looked. This makes the phenomena appear closer to standard operating procedure than some kind of freak aberration.
WHAT NOW?
Yesterday I came across Lee & Associates Commercial Real Estate Services, and their "2020 Metro Vancouver Market Overview." Sounds interesting and informative, right? In it, there are charts and figures like the following:
Though cited, every part of this document is not merely a little off but fails to make contact with reality. And wildly so. To begin with, I don’t know what “avg. income” is exactly, and they don't say, but they tell us that figure for Vancouver is $112,459. Neither this number nor anything like it appears in local, provincial, or federal census data. Not even does this category, of “average income”, tend to come up. To be generous, the closest thing that does come up is “median household income after tax.” In Vancouver that number is around $80,000 (roughly the same as the Canadian average) and, of course, is not the income of a single person. Troublingly, being $32,000 off here is not meaningfully different than adding or subtracting a zero or just publishing the output of a random number generator.
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