The Booming Real Estate Market Is Not A Phenomenon Solely Identified With The Okanagan Valley In This Province

This article is from the Kelowna Capital News

The booming real estate market is not a phenomenon solely identified with the Okanagan Valley in this province. It's happening right across B.C., and it has people both excited and apprehensive at the same time.

Why?

Because they have to ask themselves how long the upward swing in prices can continue.

When will the bottom fall out of the real estate market demand and what will happen then?

If you think about it, in Kelowna and the Westside, the demand and escalating price of real estate has little to do with economic growth, and everything to do with baby boomer generation retirement savings being deposited here.

It's no secret that when a house goes on the market here, potential buyers are eyeing up such properties from across western Canada, with the idea that it might be a retirement home investment.

Overall in B.C., the real estate market is abuzz across the Interior, while the Lower Mainland is pricing itself into the stratosphere of other major urban centres across North America.

We are entering into a new era in our country's history, the retirement phase of the baby boomer generation, which will have economic and social impacts like nothing we have experienced in our country before.

People are retiring with more money in their pockets than in previous generations and they are retiring at an earlier age. The strain that could put on our health system, the population growth pressures that places on city planners, and shortages of skilled workers in the labour market are some of the significant concerns already starting to take fold.

So while those housing prices continue to go up each year of late, the question you have to ask yourself is are you really getting ahead?

This article raises several points that have yet to be answered, the most important being: What will happen when the Boomer have retired. Will Canada's health care be over run, will salaries for vacated jobs go through the roof, thus forces the price of commodities up, and pushing the unfortunate down. Or maybe have the boomers retired will effect little in the scheme of this, with people living healthier longer. They do have to spend their money on something.

Time will tell.